I'd found a couple of museums near us that seemed worth visiting. First up: the Florida Keys History of Diving Museum. This fascinating little museum was founded by Drs. Joe and Sally Bauer, physicians who shared passions for marine biology research, scuba diving, and diving history. In the late '60s, driving back to Ohio after a diving trip, they stopped at an antiques store and bought an old diving helmet. This started a hobby that eventually became the world's largest collection of diving artifacts.
The items in the museum cover a staggering 4,000 years of diving history. The exhibits are laid out along that timeline, with the oldest stuff first.
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Most of the items on display are diving helmets of all shapes, sizes, and designs, including many that were only prototypes which failed or were never even tried.
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Especially jaw-dropping were some of the "suits of armor" that have been used for deep-sea diving. These suits probably weigh twice what I do.
There were a few interactive exhibits. I tried without success to raise a 60-lb helmet from under the water. Mike was successful at photographing the simulated diver inside the real aquarium. As with most good museums, there was far too much to see, read, and absorb in a short visit. We slowly "surfaced" after our immersion and moved on.
Our next stop was the Florida Keys History and Discovery Center. There were lots of placards with interesting stories about the keys, but not much to photograph.
The best thing was saw was a 30-minute documentary about how Henry Flagler, one of the founders of Standard Oil, built the railroad that joined all the Florida Keys together. Flagler saw the benefit of connecting Key West to the mainland after construction of the Panama Canal began in 1903. The railway project started in 1905 and was completed in 1912. It was an unbelievable undertaking given the technology of the day, costing the equivalent of over a billion dollars today.
There were a couple of other short films, including one about the 1935 hurricane that destroyed pars of the railway, but we didn't stick around for that.
Over the next couple of days I took advantage of some free time to take an online dive refresher course. I figured I needed all the help I could get before actually jumping into the water. The course was in sections; each section started by asking some quiz questions to see what you remember. Then you could do a full review if you missed questions, or just if you wanted to. I picked up a few tidbits that I'd either forgotten or never heard before, but overall the answers to all the questions were pretty much common sense.