I have been to Florida on business trips and on vacations, to see the Red Sox in spring training and to visit Miami Beach. I have been to Key West and learned about Hemingway and I have been to Orlando and experienced Disney. I have good memories of these many trips to Florida, but perhaps the best thing about Florida is knowing that soon I will be leaving. Florida strikes me as a state that is too preoccupied with being DIsney perfect, and thus many things are just not authentic. The retired folks flocking there skew the demographics (at least in the winter). Long before the young people dyed their hair a vivid blue hue, elderly women with gray or white hair would do a “blue rinse” and blue hairs became synonymous with a certain type of Florida retiree. It just is not my thing.
There are three things I remember from Florida as really enjoyable, the roseate spoonbills at Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, everything about Key West, and the delightfully cheap and entertaining 1960’s era motels built along both the east and west coasts before high rise condos became so prevalent on the beaches. These motels are now mostly gone but were available in seedy splendor in the 1980’s and 90’s when we did crazy things young parents do. We spent a week in Daytona Beach with a two year old toddler at a beachfront Days Inn where I sat in the wading pool with Megan and Harold sat in the shade admiring the young ladies in their bikinis. The fortunate thing about those early trips to Florida was that often my parents would be down there for the winter in the early 1980’s and we would have babysitters in the evening so Harold and I could go out for dinner. For some reason they actually enjoyed going to restaurants with Megan. When Harold and I went to Florida in 2010 we did find one of our favorite seedy type “old Florida” motels that had survived. It wasn’t right on the beach but tucked back on other side of a busy four lane highway that had to be crossed to get to the beach. Nevertheless, it met our guidelines of being comfortable, suitably tacky, and welcoming to dogs. One wonders if the Oasis Palms Resort still survives. https://travelswithwallie.blogspot.com/2010/ This link to Harold’s blog provides not only a glimpse of the Oasis Palms but also his blog entries of his epic road trip to Florida in 2010 when I flew down to meet him and Wally. I traveled with them for, you guessed it, a week and then flew back to Bangor.
Ding Darling is well worth the detour out to Sanibel Island if you have any interest in birds. https://www.fws.gov/refuge/JN_Ding_Darling/ There are other areas of Florida where you can experience nature and get away from built up areas. Although I have never been there, I know Maine friends who are committed birders who maintain that that area around Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island National WIldlife Refuge proivdes world class birding experiences. Others agree with them. http://spacecoastoutdoors.net/Wildlife_Home.html#:~:text=In%20the%20Northern%20section%2C%20Merritt%20Island%20National%20Wildlife,and%20many%20others%20including%20songbirds%2C%20raptors%2C%20and%20others. I mention these places to explain that I do recognize that there is more to Florida than the veneer of retiree haven and/or family vacation escapism that I have come to associate with Florida. It remains in my mind a place to visit, enjoy, and leave after a week or 10 days.
My first of many trips to Florida was to a conference on Miami Beach in 1979. My friend Linda from high school and Maine had moved to Florida by that time and it was the first time I saw her in the five or six years since she had moved from Maine. We had an enjoyable time on the Beach and I got to visit Joe’s Stone Crabs, a popular Miami eatery for the tourists. https://www.joesstonecrab.com/about-joes It is an amazing place. I have only been there that one time, never went back, but as far as I know it is still there. I have had other run ins with Miami Beach like the time Harold, Megan and I stayed at the Foutainebleau Miami Beach overnight because Megan got the chicken pox and we had to cancel our planned cruise out of Miami. Harold went down to the outdoor bar and sadly watched the line of cruise ships leaving for the Caribbean and I ordered room service for Megan (who was feeling OK but not allowed to get on the ship because she was contagious). I will always remember the look on her face when the waiter wheeled the tray into the room with the huge silver dome on top of the dinner plate. He removed the dome with a flourish revealing her hamburger and fries. We experienced even greater elegance on the Atlantic Coast staying with our friend Linda who lived for a time in Vero Beach. Once the cruise was cancelled, you guessed it, we spent a week with her and had the once in a lifetime experience of attending a polo match where Prince Charles was playing. The most memorable thing about a polo match is at the intermission you take your glass of bubbly and go out onto the field in your finery and stomp the divots back into the sod to smooth over the field for the second half of the game.
The last time I visited Florida with Harold was in 2016 when we stayed at a friend’s house in Royal Palm Beach, about 15 miles inland from the insanity of Palm Beach (which BTW has a wonderful bike trail which runs along the intercoastal waterway side of the island). Our friend has a lovely home and it is very much the type of Florida I can tolerate, not touristy or over developed, and located in a quiet residential neighborhood. We actually spent two weeks there in early March and had a relaxing time. This is a picture of her house’s lanai where we ate dinner and drank wine while watching egrets and herons roosting in trees that lined the sides of a canal that ran behind the property.
I will close out this Florida page with a few pictures from the Conch Republic because after all Key West is my favorite part of Florida, although we only spent a few days there in 2014, arriving on the catamaran ferry from Fort Myers Beach. One really can’t stay on Key West for longer periods, because it is so darn expensive! It is a great place to visit and if you have a lot of time and patience you can even drive the 163 miles from Miami to Key West, but of course then you have the added burden of a car to deal with once you get into the crowded downtown area. Harold made the drive once years ago without me. I have never done it myself. When all is said and done, I do have great memories of Florida in spite of my disdain for the “concept” of a retiree haven.
Memories - A Second Chance at Happiness 