A Nice Place If You Can Find It

...and the mile marker where you are legally required to slow down for a deer the size of a golden retriever.

In partnership with

Florida Keys Road Trip | September 17, 2026

Hey Keys lovers! September is the month the Florida Keys quietly go back to being a place where people live.

Rooms are cheap. Restaurants have open tables. The guy at the bait shop has time to actually talk to you.

Which makes it the right week to do the thing most people never do on the drive to Key West.

Get off US-1.

Not for gas. Not for a photo. Turn off, drive three miles into an island most visitors have never set foot on, and go find a bar that has spent 90 years being difficult to locate on purpose.

Mile marker 30. Big Pine Key.

Was this forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Florida Keys Road Trip every week. It's free.

❓ Keys Trivia

Visitors have stapled tens of thousands of dollars' worth of something to the walls and ceiling of the No Name Pub on Big Pine Key.

What is it?

Answer at the bottom of the newsletter.

📣 The Mile Marker Roundup

Quiet week on the event calendar, which happens every September and is not a problem.

So this week the roundup runs the way the drive does. North to south, mile marker by mile marker. These all happen this week, most of them every single day, and not one of them requires a ticket.

🎣 MM 77.5, Islamorada: Feed the Tarpon at Robbie's Buy a bucket of bait, hold a fish over the water, and watch a hundred-pound tarpon come out of the dock for it. There is a nonzero chance a pelican gets it first. Runs every day, costs about the same as a sandwich, and it remains the single best five dollars in the Upper Keys. Robbie's of Islamorada →

🍕 MM 30, Big Pine Key: The No Name Pub This week's whole newsletter is about it, so we will keep it short. Three miles off the highway, 90 years old, walls covered in stapled dollar bills, and the specialty of the house is pizza. Bring a dollar and a staple gun mindset. No Name Pub →

🎸 MM 0, Key West: Live Music at Schooner Wharf Open air, down on the Historic Seaport, live music going most of the day and no cover. This is the Key West that existed before anybody printed a T-shirt about it. Sit outside, order something cold, and let the afternoon get away from you. Schooner Wharf Bar →

🦜 MM 0, Key West: Sunday at the Green Parrot Open since 1890, no air conditioning worth mentioning, and a slogan that has never needed updating: A Sunny Place for Shady People. Sunday afternoon is when the locals turn up. Usually no cover. Almost always a band. Green Parrot Bar →

🌅 MM 0, Key West: Sunset Celebration at Mallory Square Every night, weather permitting, which in September means most of them. Jugglers, a guy with trained cats, bagpipes, tightrope, and several hundred people applauding the sun for setting on schedule. Sunset lands a little after seven this week. Get there by six if you want to actually see the performers instead of the back of somebody's head. Sunset Celebration →

🌴 Partner Spotlight

The Cheapest Week of the Year to Sleep in the Keys

Mid-September sits at the very bottom of the rate calendar. The same room that costs a small fortune in March is suddenly, briefly, reasonable.

That is the trade. You accept some heat and some bugs in exchange for an island chain that has mostly emptied out.

A lot of people who have been coming here for 30 years will tell you this is the best version of the Keys.

FloridaKeysResorts.com can help you compare places to stay from Key Largo down to Key West, with nobody taking a commission out of the middle.

See Florida Keys resorts →

🧩 Deep Dive

The Bar That Does Not Want to Be Found

The No Name Pub has a slogan, and the slogan is the whole personality of the place.

A Nice Place If You Can Find It.

They are not being cute. You will miss the turn.

It sits near the end of Watson Boulevard on Big Pine Key, about three miles off US-1, in a residential neighborhood, next to the bridge that goes to No Name Key. There is no reason for a bar to be there. There is no view. There is no parking lot to speak of.

It opened in 1936 as a general store and bait shop, back when the Overseas Highway was brand new and the Lower Keys were mostly mosquitoes and fishermen. A pub came later. So, by local account, did a brothel upstairs, which the current owners neither confirm nor particularly deny, because why would you.

It has been continuously serving people longer than almost anything else in the Lower Keys.

Then there is the money.

Every inch of the interior, walls, ceiling, beams, light fixtures, is covered in stapled dollar bills. Tens of thousands of dollars of them. Signed, dated, curling, layered on top of older layers.

Nobody planned this. Somebody stapled a dollar to the wall decades ago and everyone who came after did the same thing, and now the room is upholstered in currency.

There is a very Keys logic to it. You cannot spend it. You cannot take it down. It is not decoration exactly. It is a guest book made out of money.

And the food is pizza.

That is the part that undoes people. You drive 130 miles down an island chain, take a wrong turn twice, find a 90-year-old bar wallpapered in cash on a road going nowhere, and the specialty of the house is pizza.

It is good pizza. That is not the point.

The point is that this is what the Keys actually are, underneath the T-shirt shops. Somebody put a building somewhere strange, refused to modernize it, let the customers decorate, and stayed open for 90 years.

You will tell people about it when you get home.

🦌 Slow Down. This Part Is Not a Suggestion.

Big Pine Key and No Name Key are the only places on earth where Key deer live.

They are white-tailed deer that got stranded on these islands thousands of years ago and shrank. A full-grown buck stands around three feet at the shoulder. Picture a large dog with antlers, standing in the road, at dusk, completely unbothered by your rental car.

There are only a few hundred of them.

The speed limit through Big Pine drops hard, and it drops again at night, and Monroe County enforces it with the enthusiasm of a county that has heard every excuse. Take it seriously. Getting hit by a car is the single biggest thing that kills these deer.

Two more things while you are there.

Do not feed them. It is illegal, and it teaches them to walk toward cars, which is the opposite of helping.

And do not let the fact that one walked up to you convince you it is tame. It is a wild animal that has simply never had a reason to be afraid of a person.

Drive slow, look sideways, and you will see them. Early morning and the hour before dark are your best odds.

🍹 Four Things We'd Tell a Friend

Put the No Name Pub in your phone before you leave the highway.

Cell service out there is a rumor. Get the directions loaded while you still have bars, because "I'll find it" has been wrong for 90 consecutive years.

Call ahead about the kitchen. Actually call.

September is when Keys restaurants take their annual break. Places close for two weeks with a handwritten sign on the door and no announcement anywhere. Do not drive 90 miles on faith.

Bring bug spray you actually trust.

Big Pine at dusk after a wet summer is an experience. The sunset is free. So are the no-see-ums.

Stack Bahia Honda with it.

The state park is seven miles down the road at mile marker 37. Beach in the afternoon, deer at dusk, pizza and a wall of dollar bills after dark. That is a full day and you never drove more than ten miles.

🚗 Pull Over at the Blue Hole

Three minutes off US-1 on Big Pine is an old rock quarry that filled with fresh water and became the largest freshwater pond in the Florida Keys.

There is a short boardwalk and an observation platform. Deer come to drink. Turtles stack up on the banks. There are usually alligators, which surprises absolutely everyone, because nobody expects an alligator 30 miles from Key West.

It is free, it takes 15 minutes, and it is the best odds you have of seeing a Key deer standing still.

Go on your way down. Not on the way home, because on the way home you will be tired and you will tell yourself you will catch it next time.

Get directions →

🕰️ Lore & Legends

The Island That Turned Down Electricity

Cross the little bridge past the No Name Pub and you are on No Name Key.

Until about a decade ago, the houses out there had no electrical service. Not because nobody offered. Because the residents fought about whether to allow it, for roughly 30 years, in court.

Some of them had gone solar and off-grid long before that was a lifestyle, and they liked it. Others wanted power lines. It went through hearings, lawsuits and county commissions, and the whole thing dragged on so long that a handful of houses three miles off a federal highway spent the entire internet era running on batteries and generators.

Power finally came through in the 2010s.

There are fewer than 50 homes out there.

Which is a very long way of saying: if you drive out past the pub, understand that the people who live on that road have already demonstrated exactly how much company they are looking for.

Look at the water. Turn around. That is the whole visit, and it is worth it.

✅ Trivia Answer

Dollar bills.

Stapled to the walls, the ceiling, the beams and anything else that will hold a staple. Tens of thousands of dollars of them, signed and dated by people who came in, had a beer, and decided to leave something behind.

You can add one.

It is the cheapest souvenir in the Florida Keys, and yours will still be up there when you come back.

If you have been to the No Name Pub, hit reply and tell us whether you found it on the first try. We are keeping an informal count and the results are not flattering to anybody.

And if you have not been, put it on the list for this trip.

Not the famous stop. Not the one on the billboard.

The one three miles off the highway with no view, no sign worth mentioning, and a ceiling made of money.

That is the one you will still be talking about in February.

Until next week, keep your windows down and your watch off.

The Florida Keys Road Trip Team