How Our Visit to Dry Tortugas Became an Ordeal

4/7/2024

LONG STORY SHORT
No matter how much planning you do, things can still go wrong.

By Kristine McGowan

Dry Tortugas is one of our more peculiar national parks. Despite its name, 99% of this park lies underwater; the only dry bits are an archipelago of seven coral islands—or “keys”—that rest about 70 miles off the coast of Florida; and the largest of these keys, Garden Key, is home to a nineteenth-century fort that was never finished or fully armed.

Knowing all that, you can probably guess that visiting Dry Tortugas isn’t easy. With no roads leading to the park, visitors have to either board a ferry or take a seaplane, neither of which is cheap. And before doing that, they have to get to the southernmost tip of the Florida Keys—from which the ferry and seaplanes depart—and staying there isn’t cheap either.

We could have skipped Dry Tortugas. After all, we won’t hit every U.S. national park on the Big Trip. We could have saved this park for a future trip, perhaps during a vacation to Virgin Islands National Park.

But it seemed like a shame to skip Dry Tortugas now. We were already planning to visit Florida’s other two national parks, Biscayne and Everglades. So we’d be in southern Florida anyway. We had a chance to visit Dry Tortugas now, and we figured we should take advantage of it.

So we did. We just didn’t realize exactly how much our Dry Tortugas visit would demand of us.

Getting There: Ferry or seaplane?

Like I said, to get to Dry Tortugas, you have to take either the ferry or a seaplane. As of early 2024, ferry tickets started at $220 a pop. Seaplane tickets started at $466.

Guess which one we chose? I’ll give you a hint: We’re unemployed.

To us, the ferry seemed like the more worthwhile option anyway. Our ferry tickets would include breakfast and lunch for each of us, as well as gear for snorkeling along Garden Key’s north shore. Plus, we’d get to spend 4.5 hours on Garden Key, as opposed to the 2.5 hours we’d get with the seaplane option.

That said, taking the ferry meant we’d have to invest not only a good chunk of money into Dry Tortugas but also a lot of time. We’d have to check in for the ferry at 7 a.m. the day of our trip, and we wouldn’t return to the mainland until 5:30 p.m. Which meant we’d have to stay somewhere near the ferry terminal in Key West, Fla., during both the night before and the night following our visit.

Accommodations: Where do we stay?

Note: Our hotel in Key West looked nothing like this.

Here’s the thing about Key West: It’s very expensive.

Months ago, while planning all this, Jason looked for an available campsite near Key West on the two nights bookending our Dry Tortugas visit. What he found made his gut clench—the only available campsites cost about $200 a night. (For context, we spend an average of $30 a night on campsites.)

Technically, we could have afforded to pay that much. But we try to save money where we can, so we decided not to bring the trailer to Key West. Instead, we’d leave it near Miami, about 4 hours away, and we’d stay in a hotel in Key West the night before our trip. Then, right after the ferry docked in Key West again, we’d head straight back to Miami.

It would be a long day, but we could make it work. We know how to handle long travel days. (Case in point: our day trip to Kennedy Space Center [INSERT KSC LINK].) As long as we weren’t towing the trailer on that evening drive, we could do it.

Leaving the Trailer: What about Catsby?

How could we leave this widdle face behind?!

Of course, leaving the trailer behind would also mean leaving Catsby behind. We had a plan for that, though. It came down to three key aspects:

Our Miami campsite would have an electric hookup, so we could leave the air conditioner running to keep Catsby cool.
We could leave enough food and water out to satisfy her for one night (despite her increasingly voracious appetite).
The campsite would have 5G, so our Inseego mobile hotspot would work. Thanks to that 5G signal, we could use on our Wi-Fi thermometer to track the trailer’s interior temperature from afar and ensure Catsby was comfortable. We could also set up our two Wi-Fi cameras to keep an eye on her.

We’d used this same setup last September, when we left Catsby in Seattle for four nights while we flew home to meet our new nephew, and it’d worked out great. We assumed it’d work this time, to

So how’d it all work out?

Our hotel may have been less than ideal, but you can’t beat a Key West sunset.

I’d like to say it went perfectly and that we had the time of our lives. But that would be a lie.

After a sleepless night in our Key West hotel room—thanks in part to the heat, but mostly thanks to the in-ground pool right outside our window, where guests splashed and giggled well into the night—I staggered out of bed at 5:45 a.m., eager to get to the ferry. But first, I checked my phone.

What I saw on the screen made my heart sink. Two notifications:

Blink: Your Trailer camera is offline.

Wyze: Your WiFi camera is offline.

Both had pinged my phone about three hours earlier, but I didn’t let myself panic just yet. Maybe the power had failed at our campground. The cameras would have gone down, but the thermometer and hotspot were battery-powered; they should have still been running. So I flicked over to the app for our thermometer.

And it was offline, too.

Okay, I thought. Time to panic.

The anxiety-driven part of my brain immediately convinced me that something horrible had happened. Someone must have broken into our trailer and stolen everything. No, wait—hadn’t I read somewhere that the hotspot could be a fire hazard when left plugged into an outlet, which we’d done because its battery usually lasts only about 7 hours? It must have started a fire, yes, that’s what happened. Our home was burning to the ground right now.

Fortunately, Jason’s more level-headed than I am, and he knows exactly how to tamp down my anxiety. (I’m afraid he’s had lots of practice.) The most likely possibility, he said, was that Catsby had tripped over the hotspot’s power cord and unplugged it. The hotspot’s battery then dwindled and died, disconnecting the cameras and thermometer from the internet.

“Besides,” he added, “we’re almost four hours away. Whatever happened, it’s not like we can do anything about it right now.”

Which was a good point.

So we headed to the ferry terminal for our 8 a.m. departure, as planned. Along the way, Jason called our campground, just to check in and confirm nothing catastrophic had happened. Nobody answered, but that was no surprise: Our campground’s front office didn’t open until 9 a.m. By then, we’d be sailing out into the Atlantic and losing signal.
Our campground had overnight security, though. We didn’t have their number—in hindsight, we should have gotten it before leaving camp—but no one had tried to contact us. That assuaged my anxiety more than anything else. If our trailer had spontaneously combusted, surely our phones would have been ringing.

Still. Without confirmation that everything was OK, neither of us could shake a small, clinging sense of dread. It only got worse as the ferry sped us out into the Atlantic and the signal on our phones faded from three bars to two, then one, then disappeared entirely.

Maybe we shouldn’t have gotten on the ferry, I thought. This dread would hang over our heads all day, until we learned whether Catsby and the trailer were OK. What was the point of going to Dry Tortugas if we wouldn’t enjoy it?*

Fortunately, Dry Tortugas had an answer for that.

Two and a half hours later, our ferry drew up to one of the strangest sites we’ve ever seen: the brick walls of Fort Jefferson, seemingly floating on the sea, kept abreast only by a sandy island just large enough to house the fort. We stepped off the ferry and straight into a guided tour. Then we wandered off on our own, meandering up to the fort’s highest level to get a 360-degree view of Garden Key and the sparkling turquoise waters surrounding it. Then we strapped on some goggles, snorkels, and fins, and we got in the water, swimming with the fish who’ve made a home among the coral growing along the fort’s foundation.

Before we knew it, we were having fun. It turns out that Dry Tortugas is the kind of place that can make you forget your house might be burning down.

What the heck happened at the trailer?

We didn’t find out until we got back to our campsite later that night, around 9:30 p.m., after we’d returned to the mainland and made the three-and-a-half-hour drive home.
We pulled up to the trailer to find everything exactly as we’d left it, inside and out. The thermometer was still working, the cameras still plugged in and turned on. The hotspot was still plugged in, too—Catsby hadn’t touched a thing.

Yet, for some reason, the hotspot was dead.

Plugged in, but it had stopped charging.

We still don’t know why. We didn’t have this problem when we left Catsby alone last September. Our best guess is that the hotspot’s USB-to-AC power adapter caused the issue; we hadn’t used it during our September trip. Instead, we’d plugged the hotspot directly into one of the trailer’s USB charging ports.

Lesson learned, I guess. We won’t be using that adapter again.

And another, arguably more important lesson: Regardless of how much planning you do, things can still go wrong. What matters is how you react when they do.
I’m especially grateful for Jason in those moments. No one helps me to wrangle my anxiety under control like he does. If not for him, I would have reacted to this situation in all the wrong ways, and we would have missed out on a special day.

Thanks, haneeey.

* We had invested lots of money into this day trip, for starters. Yet another good point provided by Jason.

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