The Keys road has two overlooks and three national parks

Byway has surfaced exactly two overlooks along the Florida Keys Hwy. One is recorded as Observation Tower. The other is recorded as Observation Platform. Neither name says what it faces, and on this road that is not an omission.

An overlook exists because there is somewhere better to stand than the road. Here there is not.

The road is the view

Compare it with any other All-American Road. The Blue Ridge Parkway carries 204 surfaced overlooks. Big Sur has twelve, named for the headlands they sit on. The Keys have two, named for the fact that they are structures you can stand on.

The difference is that the Parkway and the coast highway both run alongside the thing you came to see, so a pull-off buys you a better angle on it. A road built across open water has no better angle. You are already in the middle of it, and have been since the first bridge.

Three national parks, almost all of it water

Against the committed boundaries, this corridor comes within reach of Everglades, Dry Tortugas and Biscayne. Three national parks on one road, and the road touches the edge of each rather than passing through it, because there is very little in any of them a car can reach.

What people stop for instead

With nothing to look at from the roadside, the surfaced places are things somebody made: the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum, the Key West Lighthouse Keeper's Quarters Museum, the Truman Little White House, the Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower, Theater of the Sea, the Laura Quinn Wild Bird Sanctuary.

And the beaches, which on the Keys are the deliberate ones: Anne's Beach, Calusa Beach, CB Harvey Rest Beach Park, North Beach. A road that is all edge does not produce many beaches by accident.

The song

Volume 007 of the byway series is Turn Around Or Don't. It is the only decision a road with one lane in each direction and water on both sides ever offers.