Exploring the Culture, Coasts, and Hidden Corners of Florida
Florida is very good at starting over. Sometimes too good. We knock down motels because they aren’t tall enough. Orange groves become subdivisions. Restaurants disappear beneath condominiums. A roadside attraction can spend 40 years convincing everybody to stop, then vanish…
Florida spends a remarkable amount of time building places for people to leave. Airports, cruise terminals, interstate ramps, boat launches and hotel checkout lanes are all designed around departure. Even many of our great attractions are exercises in movement: arrive,…
Florida has a water problem. There is too much of it, and there is sometimes not enough of it. It arrives in the wrong places, leaves places where we would prefer it to stay, falls from the sky with extraordinary…
Florida makes vacations. We are exceptionally good at it. We make hotel nights, beach weekends, cruise departures, fishing trips, theme-park days and increasingly elaborate frozen drinks. We manufacture reasons for people in Ohio to stare out the window in February…
Florida looks different at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. The beaches are still there, and the theme parks are already operating at full industrial strength. Somewhere on I-95, somebody is discovering that the rest of the state apparently had…
Florida has spent an extraordinary amount of money helping us drive toward water. Bridges carry us across bays. Causeways deliver us to islands. Six-lane roads funnel traffic toward beaches, parking garages and waterfront restaurants. We can cross an entire coastal…
Florida makes considerably more sense at three miles an hour. That is admittedly inconvenient in a state that spent much of the last century perfecting the art of driving six miles to get somewhere you can see from where you…
Florida rewards people who get up before everybody else. I realize this is an irritating thing to say on vacation. Vacations are supposed to involve sleeping late, ignoring the alarm and refusing to be anywhere before coffee has had time…
Florida has rivers that don’t always behave like rivers. That probably shouldn’t be surprising. This is a state built on limestone, riddled with springs, sinkholes and underground passages, surrounded by salt water and so flat in places that water seems…
Florida is full of towns that make more sense when you imagine a railroad running through them. A broad main street that seems too ambitious for the population around it. An old brick warehouse beside an empty right-of-way. A depot…