Day Trips from Miami

Everglades National Park is not one place with one gate. Three entrances face Miami and they are hours apart from each other.

Shark Valley, on the Tamiami Trail about 25 miles west of the city, is the closest and the best half-day. A 15-mile paved loop runs into the sawgrass with an observation tower at the far end. You can walk the first mile, hire a bike, or take the two-hour ranger-narrated tram. In the dry season alligators lie on the verge of the path at arm's length, which is exactly as unnerving as it sounds and entirely safe if you keep your distance.

The Ernest Coe entrance near Homestead, about an hour south, is the one for walking. The Anhinga Trail at Royal Palm is a short boardwalk over a slough with the densest concentration of visible wildlife in the park, and the road continues 38 miles to Flamingo on Florida Bay, which is a full day in itself.

Everglades City and the Gulf Coast, about an hour and three quarters west, is the mangrove and Ten Thousand Islands end, and it is boat country.

Entry is charged per vehicle for seven days and has been running at around $35, valid at every entrance. Bring more water than you think, and repellent from May onwards.

One thing to get right: there are no airboats running out of Shark Valley, Flamingo or the Gulf Coast. The airboat operators are on the Tamiami Trail corridor, on Miccosukee land, on private wetland, and at three long-established concessions that were grandfathered in when the 1989 expansion act pulled the East Everglades into the park. Our airboat page and Everglades tours page cover the difference.

Biscayne National Park is the one nobody plans for, because on a map it looks like water with a car park attached. That is roughly accurate: about 95 per cent of the park is underwater, protecting the northernmost Florida Keys, the mangrove shoreline and part of the third-largest barrier reef system in the world.

The visitor centre at Convoy Point, near Homestead, is about 50 minutes from downtown and free to enter. From the shore you get a short trail, a jetty and a view. That is the whole land-based experience, and it is why the park's visitor numbers look thin next to the Everglades.

The park is reached properly by boat. The park's own non-profit institute runs trips out of Homestead and Coconut Grove: a heritage cruise to Boca Chita Key, the island with the ornamental stone lighthouse, has run at about $83 per person; reef, wreck and bay snorkelling trips at around $64; and small-group snorkel experiences capped at six passengers nearer $99. Independent charters also run. Book ahead in winter and expect cancellations in strong easterly wind, which flattens visibility on the reef.

What you see: seagrass flats, mangrove edges, living reef, and the Maritime Heritage Trail, a set of shipwrecks marked with mooring buoys that you can snorkel over.

Going south is also a chance to make the drive worth something in itself. The Deering Estate at Palmetto Bay and Matheson Hammock, with its man-made tidal atoll pool flushed by Biscayne Bay, are both on the route.

US-1 leaves the mainland south of Homestead, runs across an 18-mile causeway through mangrove and open water, and arrives in Key Largo. From central Miami that is an hour to an hour and a quarter without traffic.

Key Largo is built around John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, established in the early 1960s as the first undersea park in the United States. The reef is about six miles offshore, so everything worth doing here involves a boat: snorkel trips, glass-bottom boat runs and dive charters leave from the park and from marinas along the highway. The submerged bronze Christ of the Abyss statue sits in about 25 feet of water on Key Largo Dry Rocks and is the single most photographed thing in the Keys.

Islamorada, half an hour further, is the fishing end: charter boats, sandbars, the tarpon feeding at Robbie's, and a sequence of bridges that make the drive itself worthwhile.

Marathon and the Seven Mile Bridge are about two and three quarter hours from Miami, which is the outer limit of a comfortable day.

Practical notes for any Keys day. Addresses run by mile marker, counting down from 106 at Key Largo to zero in Key West. There is essentially one road, so a crash anywhere on it closes your route with no detour available. Fuel is more expensive than on the mainland. And mosquitoes at dusk in the mangrove are a serious proposition from May to October.

Brightline leaves from MiamiCentral downtown, and it is the most civilised day trip on this page because it involves no car at all.

Fort Lauderdale is around half an hour up the line. The station sits a short ride from Las Olas Boulevard, the Riverwalk and the beach, and the water taxi network along the New River and the Intracoastal is a genuinely good way to spend an afternoon.

West Palm Beach is a little over an hour, and the station is walkable to Clematis Street, the waterfront and the Norton Museum of Art, with Worth Avenue in Palm Beach across the bridge.

Orlando is about three and a half hours, which makes a theme park day technically possible and practically punishing. Treat it as a way to move between cities rather than as a day trip.

Fares vary with demand and how far ahead you book, with advance saver fares that have started around $39 and premium fares well above that. Booked late on a Friday, the train can cost more than the petrol. Booked two weeks out, it is the cheapest sensible way north.

The slower alternative is Tri-Rail, the commuter line, which is considerably cheaper, considerably slower, and runs from a station connected to Miami International Airport up through Fort Lauderdale to West Palm Beach. It is a fine option if the schedule suits and the budget is the constraint.