Adventures in Florida Keys Dining

Key lime pie stuffed French toast:: It's what's for breakfast in KW.

I’ve often been known to eat key lime pie for breakfast in the privacy of my own home. On my latest Keys noshing binge, however, surprise! I actually found a restaurant that indulges my secret quirk.

Okay, Azur restaurant at Eden House inn disguises it as key lime pie stuffed French toast – making it at least SOUND like breakfast food, but it’s actually two slices of pie (graham cracker crust and all) wedged between four slices of egg-dipped sautéed toast and topped with berry compote. 

There ought to be a “Life Is Good” T-shirt for that.

Every winter when I travel through the Keys to update the Fodor’s guidebook, I try to hit different restaurants. Here’s how it went last week.

Day one. Touchdown.

My teeny Cape Air plane landed Sunday morning just in time for breakfast. I headed to the closest place to the Key West airport serving breakfast – Town N Tavern at the Beachside Marriott. In Key West New Town, the restaurant was originally a Norman Van Aken creation.

New Zealand Island-Hopping

Chapters of adventure in Northland

A Maori woman told us the island’s name means “beginning of a book” in the language of her tribe.

At 11 letters, the New Zealand isle of Urupukapuka could practically qualify as a book on its length alone. Coincidental that book-writing guy Zane Grey once stayed on the island?

Locals around the Bay of Islands, at “the top of the North Island” as they say, tell that the famed American cowboy scribe took to writing about fishing here on the other side of the world from the wild, wild west.

Kicking back on Urupukapuka Island.

“He holds the record for the number of marlin caught in New Zealand in one day,” our guide told us on our Bay of Islands dolphin tour boat when it landed for a little terra firma break last week during my first-time NZ adventure. That record has never been broken, mainly because laws have since restricted the number of marlin taken at one time.