Eleven entries, and the region divides cleanly in two. There is Miami and its suburbs, and there is the Everglades, and the drive between them is about an hour of sawgrass with almost nothing in it.
The Miami side is stranger than its reputation: a Cistercian monastery that William Randolph Hearst bought in Segovia and had dismantled, which customs repacked into the wrong boxes and which then sat in a Brooklyn warehouse for twenty-six years before anyone solved the puzzle; a lagoon quarried out of coral rock and refilled from artesian wells; a Tequesta circle cut into the limestone, found in 1998 under a demolished block and then deliberately reburied to protect it.
The Everglades side is emptier and better. A post office the size of a shed that still sorts mail across three counties. A trading post at the end of a road that was itself the subject of a decade of litigation. A missile base left where it stood in 1979. Several of these are only reachable by boat, so read the access notes before committing to a day.
