The Overseas Highway

Posted on January 25, 2026 by admin

A few days ago, I sent the following email to the curator and historian at the Key West Art & Historical Society, Dr. Cori Convertito:

Dr. Convertito,

I recently visited Key West for another pleasant visit, and came away with a question I haven’t been able to answer, though perhaps I haven’t looked in the right places.

Who is credited with the creation of the Conch Republic flag? I understand that it appeared at the same time as the infamous roadblock and the “secession,” but detail on its creation is lacking. Do you happen to know that?

One reason to ask is that it’s a handsome design, though I’m not sure about the star pattern asterisms — is one or another supposed to be the Southern Cross?

Today she answered:

That’s a perceptive question, and a difficult one to answer definitively. The Conch Republic flag emerged alongside the 1982 ‘secession,’ but attribution is complicated by the fact that several individuals have, over the years, laid claim to the original iteration of the artwork, and reliable contemporary documentation is limited. As a result, it’s hard to credit a single creator with certainty.

What is clearer is the intent behind the design elements. In addition to the conch shell and sun, the star groupings are generally understood to represent two navigational asterisms: the Southern Cross and the Northern Cross (Cygnus). Their inclusion appears deliberate, reinforcing Key West’s maritime identity and its symbolic position between hemispheres.

I hope that helps clarify what is known, and what remains unresolved.

So the short answer is, like with a number of historical questions – even ones as recent as this – no one is sure. Good to know. Thanks, Dr. Convertito.

The Overseas Highway, from mainland Florida to Key West, or vice versa, is epic all around: an epic construction project once upon a time, and an epic drive in our time. Through the Upper Keys, the likes of Key Largo and Islamorada, the ocean isn’t usually visible, obscured behind thick development: commercial and residential buildings and omnipresent marinas. But it isn’t long before you’re skipping from key to key, some larger, some smaller, with water widely visible on both sides of the road.

The most epic section of the crossing, as far as I’m concerned: Seven-Mile Bridge.

On an ordinary highway, seven miles isn’t much of a stretch at highway speeds. Listen to one song or another on the radio and you’re practically done with it. Those same minutes have a different quality over the wide water, glinting in the sun and spotted with boats and occasional small keys in the distance. There’s a sense of the mildly impossible. Of course it’s entirely possible, via a feat of 20th-century civil engineering, as is the 100-plus miles of the whole highway. I don’t believe my civil engineer grandfather ever drove the Overseas Highway, but I’ll bet he read about it with considerable satisfaction.

“The original 7 Mile Bridge, also known as the Knights Key-Pigeon Key-Moser Channel-Pacet Channel Bridge, was constructed in the early 1900s as part of Henry Flagler’s ambitious Overseas Railroad project,” notes the Key West Blog. “This railroad connected mainland Florida to Key West, revolutionizing transportation and trade in the region. However, after a devastating hurricane in 1935, the railroad was destroyed, and the bridge was converted into a highway.”

The history is a little more complicated than that, with the current bridge a 1980s work, leaving part of the original as a pedestrian and (especially) a fishing bridge. I’m no sport fisherman, but I understand tarpon, snook, snapper, grouper, bonefish and barracuda swim these waters.

At Big Pine Key, we stopped for a visit to the National Key Deer Refuge, a place focused on giving key deer a place to live, as it says in the name. For human visitors, there is a trail.

It goes partly around a pond in the refuge. No deer were to be seen.

We did spot a gator, however. Or maybe a croc. Hard to tell at this angle. They both live in southern Florida.

A sign on the trail warns visitors not about reptiles, but a nearby poisonwood tree.

Poisonwood? A native to the Keys. It sounds bad, and it is.

“Metopium Toxiferum [poisonwood] is related to poison oak, poison ivy, and poison sumac,” says the Tree Care Guide. “The tree produces the same irritant, urushiol, which causes an itchy, blistering rash. The oils from Metopium toxiferum cause dermatitis ranging in severity from a light red rash to intense skin blistering. Tea made from Metopium toxiferum leaves and twigs combined with bleach has been used to induce abortions but has also tended to kill the patient.”

Yikes. We took the advice of the sign and didn’t go near it.

Across the road from the refuge parking lot, some undeveloped key landscape. There couldn’t be that much of that, at least on the keys connected by the highway.

In Islamorada, which is spread across five small keys much closer to the mainland than either Key West or Big Pine Key, we stopped to pay our respects at the memorial to those who died in the 1935 hurricane.

Also in Islamorada, we drove past Betsy the Lobster, but sorry to say, didn’t stop for a closer look. What was I thinking?

Conch Republic Nuggets

Posted on January 22, 2026 by admin

In Key West last month, we noticed the Conch Republic flag displayed in more than a few places.

More about the not-very-serious Conch Republic micronation, created in 1982, is in this Miami Take article. Curiously, the article doesn’t describe how the flag came to be, just that it was simultaneous with the declaration of the CR, which was a kind of protest against a surprise U.S. Border Patrol roadblock on US 1 at the entrance to the Keys. Still, the design works, and it’s something distinctively Key West.

Saw the very distinctive Sicilian flag in Key West, too, just off Duval, over a joint that promised southern Italian food.

The design is not only distinctive, but ancient. This is a silver drachma from Sicily, ca. 300 BC.

I digress. During one of our Key West walkabouts, we made a point of finding the southern terminus of highway US 1, which is at the intersection of Fleming and Whitehead streets.

A business taking advantage of its unique location. Locational branding, they might say in marketing.

Now that I’ve now seen the southern terminus of US 1, that clearly means I have to see the northern terminus. That happens to be in Fort Kent, Maine, so perhaps a summertime visit. A real epic would be driving the entire 2,369 miles between Key West and Fort Kent on that highway. People drive all of the 2,448-mile Route 66, and it’s not even a real highway anymore. I’ve been gifted, or cursed, with the ability to think up more long trips that I can possibly do.

Half a block away from the beginning/end of US 1 is the Monroe County courthouse.

A nearby sign says: The original wooden courthouse was completed in 1823. The county occupied most of the Southern Florida Peninsula. The county seat in Key West currently covers the Florida Keys, and portions of the Everglades National Park. The present red brick courthouse, built in a traditional county courthouse style, was completed in 1890. It features a 100-foot tall clock tower and is an architectural feature that can be observed from almost any part of Key West.

A traditional county courthouse? In the Northeast, yes. Looks like someone used one of those building-moving transit beams in Rocky Horror to transport an entire New England courthouse down to the Keys.

The courthouse grounds comes with this oddity.

At least, odd to me.

A kapok tree, ceiba pentandra. Odd to more than just me. Enough people that the city put a sign describing kapok trees, next to this example of one. The sign’s a bit worse for wear.

Java cotton is one name for its fiber, which surely evokes distant islands.

More Key West signs.

Is this not a handsome building? And looks solid enough to stand in any mere wind.

Formerly the island’s Custom House, Post Office, Federal Courthouse and 7th District Lighthouse Offices. Built – the early 1890s – when architectural beauty wasn’t considered in conflict with the practice of republican government. These days, it’s the Key West Museum of Art & History.

Sure, the chicken has been crossing the road for a long time now, but how often did you actually see it?

Pretty often in Key West, is the answer.

I’m hard pressed to think of any other North American town with footloose chickens. As in, on the streets and sidewalks. Not out in rural areas, but even there you don’t seem to see that many. Then again, the Conch Republic is only tangentially a North American town. North Caribbean is another way to describe it.

“When people stopped the laborious process of turning live chickens into Sunday dinner many decades ago, some backyard chickens gained their freedom,” notes Florida Rambler. “Other roosters were released when cock-fighting became illegal.”

So, for this rooster, his great- great- however many great-granddaddy was a champion cock, known to betting men from here to Savannah?

They’ve gone on to a career of being local color, these birds, with forays in behaving like pests in people’s yards. They are feral, after all, living in the lushness that is Key West. Was the chicken ever considered for the Conch Republic flag? Probably not; chickens don’t get a lot of respect from people, unless they’re dinner.

The Harry S. Truman Little White House

Posted on January 14, 2026 by admin

Nightmarish human faces weren’t invented by demented AI, but have long been with us. Case in point.

There’s Harry Truman in there somewhere. This particular wax dummy watches patrons in the small gift shop at the Harry S. Truman Little White House, which we toured on our second day in Key West.

The property belongs to the state of Florida these days, but of course was once a federal facility. Specifically, used by the Navy as officers’ quarters for the base at Key West. Truman took a cotton to the island early in his presidency, and visited often, and this is where the Navy put him up. He came to relax and play cards and fish and drink, naturally, but also to be president somewhere besides Washington in winter, since by the 1940s communication tech could facilitate such a thing.

The museum has been restored to its appearance in the late 1940s, and damned if it isn’t like walking into my grandparents’ time, entering an ordinary sort of American house of the period. The president might have stayed there, but Harry and Bess weren’t the sorts who went in for the latest expensive styles, but rather the sort of things available at a department store or via mail order: couches with some color but not too much, wooden coffee and end tables, mid-century lamps, etc.

Except, that is, for the handsome custom-make card table. That wasn’t available from Montgomery Ward.

“The poker table was a gift to Truman in 1949 by three civilian contractors working in the U.S. Naval Station cabinet shop,” says Wood Shop News. “The table is a marvel of craftsmanship and one of the most popular pieces at the Key West facility. Measuring 58” in diameter and 28” high, according to Little White House executive director Bob Wolz, it is based on a poker table that was used on the U.S.S. Williamsburg presidential yacht. The piece is made of mahogany with built-in chip holders and ashtrays crafted from recycled brass shell casings. A solid tabletop can be used to cover the poker table to turn into a dining space.”

The limo parked on the grounds of the Little White House wasn’t standard mid-America either.

A nearby sign says that it is a 1950 Lincoln Cosmopolitan Presidential Limousine. One of nine that the Truman administration used, since in those days presidential vehicles weren’t transported by air, as they are now, so the government had them stationed in various parts of the country, ready to use.

The car is a museum piece, but no mere museum piece, since I understand that the current owner, the Key West Harry S. Truman Foundation, rents it under specific conditions. Namely, you pay some large fee, and are driven around Key West for a while. I learned this when we saw an elderly couple get in the back seat, followed by a uniformed driver, and off they went.

One more thing about the Little White House: the grounds are a small arboretum.

Flora includes well-known varieties, such as avocado, coconut, date palm, mahogany and mango, plus less-than-household names, such as Fiji fan palm, soapberry tree, and my own favorite name, gumbo limbo, whose “wood, though soft, was used in the past to carve carousel horses,” the museum tells us.

Everglades National Park: Skeeters

Posted on January 6, 2026 by admin

I’ve seen maps of Everglades National Park for years, and noted with great interest the main road snaking through the park, from the southern part of greater Miami to a point on the peninsula’s south coast. It was a road I’d long wanted to drive (in red, below), and on the afternoon of December 12, that’s what we did. Only about 40 miles each way in the park, so not too long a drive.

We stayed in Homestead, as far south as metro Miami goes, for the purpose of visiting the Everglades. Outside the park, the road is Florida 9336. Inside the park, it’s the less interestingly named Main Park Road. Odd, considering that some examples of nearby features are named Gumbo Limbo Trail, Hells Bay Canoe Trail, Alligator Creek, Snake Bight Trail and Coot Bay and Coot Bay Pond.

Almost no one else was around, which is the secret sauce for most enjoyable drives. My only minor complaint is that Pa-hay-okee Overlook, at the edge of a cypress zone, was closed. Considering how flat the terrain is, that view would have been expansive.

The park road takes you to Flamingo, Florida, which has no current human population unless you count park staff, who must stay nearby somewhere at least sometimes. Flamingo has no flamingos, according to a park ranger we met, whom I’ll call Bobbie. There seem to have been some of the birds in the late 19th century, she said, but they moved on when hunters showed up, looking for a source of colorful feathers for women’s hats fashionable at the time.

Plenty of other birds are still around, looking for a meal. Hadn’t seen that many circling birds since we were in north-central India.

Flamingo, which is mostly the visitors center, lodging and campgrounds, offered views of Florida Bay and a few of its many keys, a term not limited to the chain of islands connected by the Overseas Highway.

We saw a manatee. Or at least a manatee nose poking out of the water near one of the docks at the park, then ducking underwater with an occasional small splash. The barest outline of its bulk was visible below.

For some reason, the rusty fire hydrants on the park service property caught my attention.

We walked the Guy Bradley Trail. The Flamingo visitors center is also named for Bradley, an early game warden in the area who died in 1905 at the hands of poachers.

The trail, paved and mostly in good shape, was an easy one.

With some views of its own, including the ocean and not including the ocean.

One reason to visit the Everglades during the winter months, maybe the number-two reason right after the absence of searing heat, is the absence of mosquitoes. Make that the relative absence of mosquitoes. During our walk through the greenery around Guy Bradley Trail, a small number of winter mosquitoes were there to greet us.

Even in an age of DEET and whatever has mostly replaced DDT, you will find mosquitoes and more importantly, they will find you. That’s my experience over the years.

South Korea, 1990.

I close my eyes and I can recall those Pusan nights in ’90 in my non-climate controlled room, drinking the tea available in pots just outside everyone’s door, swatting mosquitoes that had clearly feasted on me moments before they died, and listening to the irregular beep-BEEP-beep-beeps of auto horns wafting in through the damaged window screens, along with more mosquitoes.

Saskatchewan, 2006

The only creature I run into regularly while camping is one or another kind of mosquito. The weather had been dryish in Jasper NP, so there weren’t that many there. Things had been even drier at Theodore Roosevelt NP, and we encountered only a very few hardy mosquitoes who managed to survive wrigglerhood in the risk-of-wildfire badlands this summer.

The plains near Regina, Saskatchewan, were another story. On the evening of July 3, we found a private campground a few miles east of Regina for a reasonable C$14. The place was sparse with people, probably since the Canada Day long weekend was winding down, but well populated with blood-drinking vermin. Their main diet likely came from the livestock on the surrounding ranches, but they weren’t above snacking on human beings. Once a cloud of them followed me, so I had to zig-zag back to our camp to lose them. Others buzzed intensely around the tent door until I sprayed it with Off.

Florida Panhandle, 2009

I got out of my car to look around. The forest seemed even more oppressively dense with rain clouds gathering overhead. The air was warm and a little steamy. All I heard was the crunching of my footsteps, the mild rush of the wind, the twitter of birds and, suddenly, the buzz of mosquitoes. Mammals as large as human beings must be a tasty treat for the mosquitoes of the Apalachicola River Basin, because they attacked with terrific speed and in increasing numbers. For all I know, there are a dozen kinds, part of the wonderful biodiversity of the area. I had no chemical protection. I’d forgotten to pack anything with DEET in it, and the TSA might have taken it away anyway.

I took a short look at an interpretive kiosk that had some artifacts behind glass, and another look at the Milly Francis marker, but within a few minutes I retreated to the car. A couple of the mozzies followed me in, but I managed to dispatch the bastards in a pop of my blood.

South Carolina, 2025

Other national parks have majestic mountains or picturesque glaciers or striking deserts or epic coastlines or an important history of human activity. They have high-profile wildlife and ecosystems unique in the world. Congaree does count as a special place, preserving a tiny fraction of the floodplain forests that used to cover much of the Southeast, but that’s a little hard to appreciate on the ground, especially as the target of its high-profile wildlife, mosquitoes.

Everglades National Park: Gators

Posted on January 5, 2026 by admin

On December 11, I took this picture.

Text to a friend, along with the image: Now, what’s the bump in the water? Ah, it’s an alli AHHHGH

Reply from friend: Ha. Ha.

I thought it was funny, even though the joke depends on an alligator canard. As Bob the alligator wrangler told us the next day after our boat tour of the northern reaches of Everglades National Park, the creatures are actually “pretty chill.”

It’s those lowlife crocs that will attack you for no good reason and, I have to report, south Florida is one of the few places where alligators and crocodiles share a habitat. Of course it is. Bob worked for Coopertown Airboats, which is on US 41 and whose tours ply the nearby sawgrass waters, and have since 1945.

The company also has a few alligators lounging around the grounds in cement ponds, and some baby gators, one of which Bob handled with no problem. “Just keep you fingers away from his mouth,” he said, inviting us to touch the alligator. I don’t know why I was surprised to find that a living alligator’s skin feels pretty much like an alligator skin purse or wallet.

Behind glass at Coopertown was the Everglades’ real menace, anyway, a fat, pale ugly-as-can-be python, an inert reptilian Sydney Greenstreet whose countless cousins have claimed much of the biomass of the Everglades as their own, one nightmarish swallow at a time. The python is king of invasive species in Florida, which is saying quite a lot.

The Coopertown gators weren’t hard to find.

Neither were the boats. Nice, simple wayfinding.

I expected the tour boat to look something like this, which was tied up at one of the docks.

The kind you see, or used to see, on TV. The sawgrass and alligator encounters made me think (a few days later) of Flipper for the first time in many long decades. It wasn’t a show we watched much in our house in the mid-60s, but I have a very vague memory of it, maybe from repeats but also reinforced by the saccharine theme song as included on one of the TV Toons records I owned in the ’80s. Reading about the show, I found that it was set in the Keys and not the Everglades, and the characters tooled around in a more standard motorboat. Still, it might have been the first time I ever heard about the Keys.

Those spiffy airboats are for the more expensive tours, I think. Ours was a larger flatbottom with a few rows of metal benches for regular tourists.

But it was pretty good seating for the half hour or so, especially since we got the front row.

Off we went into the grassy water, dotted by quasi-islands sprouting trees. Soon the scenery looked like this.

And this.

Leaving me to wonder, I’m glad the guide knows his way around, because I’d be lost instantly. The boat guide wasn’t Gator Bob, incidentally, but an older fellow perched in the pilot’s cage.

Before long, we found a lounging alligator in the wild.

December is part of the sluggish season for local reptiles, the guide explained. Not too cold for alligators, naturally, but cool enough that lying around in the sun is a good option for them. Regardless, the gator – let’s call him Bob – had his own paparazzi for a few moments.

Our return took us through thick patches of lily pads. They moved aside without tangling or anything complicating that would happen if I were piloting the boat.

Bonus at Cooperville, out near the parking lot. A US Coast & Geodetic Survey Bench Mark, dating from 1965 if I read that right.

Another bonus: A World Heritage Site plaque, complete with comments by birds.

“Everglades National Park is the largest designated sub-tropical wilderness reserve on the North American continent,” UNESCO says. “Its juncture at the interface of temperate and sub-tropical America, fresh and brackish water, shallow bays and deeper coastal waters creates a complex of habitats supporting a high diversity of flora and fauna. It contains the largest mangrove ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere, the largest continuous stand of sawgrass prairie and the most significant breeding ground for wading birds in North America.”

Good old wading birds. Still, that isn’t what people come to see. That would be gators. How do I know this? Consider a scene from a souvenir shop I visited later in our trip.

It was much further north, but still Florida.

Big Cypress National Preserve

Posted on January 4, 2026 by admin

Americans know their national parks – the famous ones, anyway – but how about their national preserves? A similar, yet different sort of designation by Congress. I don’t know all the details myself, but one thing is that resource extraction seems to be possible in limited ways at least some of the 21 preserves, but not at all (?) in the 63 parks. Regardless, preserves are different places on the maps, though they are often adjacent to parks.

Such as Big Cypress National Preserve, which is a large chunk of Florida next to Everglades NP.

Head south from metro Orlando on US 27 and eventually – and it takes a while – the suburban aspects peter out and give way to agriculture, especially citrus and sugarcane. At a hamlet called Palmdale, the highway Florida 29 continues the trek south, meeting both I-75 (Everglades Parkway, Alligator Alley) and US 41. By that time, agriculture has given away to (mostly) undeveloped wetlands. Swamp, in the old days, but in fact the preserve and the park don’t qualify as such. We picked US 41 and headed east, into the thick in the Big Cypress.

Daylight is short in December, even in southern Florida, so we barely had time to traverse US 41 before losing the light. But we managed a few stops.

The territory was behind fences in some spots.

Mostly not.

By dark, we’d passed out of the preserve and on to the edge of the national park. Much of US 41 – known as the Tamiami Trail in part of Florida according to various sources, but not on any signs that I saw – is under construction toward its eastern end, meaning a tight drive through concrete barricades, everyone’s least favorite kind of driving. Under reconstruction, that is, and for good reason.

“The Tamiami Trail (U.S. Highway 41) has long been recognized as one of the primary barriers to flow of water through the ecosystem,” the NPS notes. “The need to eliminate barriers to overland flow of water in the Everglades is considered one of the indisputable tenets of restoration. Much scientific information amassed in recent decades reinforces the importance of removing these barriers to water flow in order to restore natural marsh connectivity.

“In 2009, Congress authorized implementation of the plan selected in the 2008 Modified Water Deliveries to Everglades National Park, Tamiami Trail Modifications, Limited Reevaluation Report (LRR) … The LRR plan would improve potential marsh connectivity, reduce sharp changes in water velocity, and improve rainy season depths and durations. In addition, these modifications will improve the ridge and slough landscape and fish productivity, which could result in increased foraging success for wading birds.”

It makes for a temporarily unpleasant drive, but I think we can all get behind increased foraging success for wading birds and other worthwhile eco-goals for the much abused Everglades. Now only if the plan could do something about Everglades pythons.

Winter Park, Florida

Posted on December 31, 2025 by admin

Regards for the New Year. Back to posting four days into 2026, maybe with tales of Florida alligator tourism. The change of the year always brings me the same reaction: how did that number get so high? This time around, I wonder how is it that 1976, a good (mostly) year I remember fairly well for a number of reasons, was 50 years ago?

Orlando, Yuriko was surprised to learn, is an actual city. The day after Universal Epic Universe, we drove from our hotel near that park, past Orlando’s sizable downtown, and to the inner suburb of Winter Park. She marveled that the city had a presence besides the sprawl of the theme parks, which are at some distance from the Orlando CBD. Bet she isn’t the only person, upon leaving the theme park zone, with that reaction.

One could devise a pretty good multi-day visit to Orlando, to see its green spaces and historic sites and museums, and take in a few shops and restaurants and some live music, and never pay the Mouse or Comcast a dime. Maybe one day I will do such a visit, but the pull of the theme parks is pervasive. Even my businesses trips of yore (early 2000s) to central Florida tended to gravitate toward the parks. Why would you skip the theme parks? would be the reaction, even — and most importantly — among members of my family. For now, part of a day away from the Theme Park Industrial Complex will have to do.

I’d gotten wind of a tour boat ride on Winter Park’s small lakes that (1) wasn’t expensive and only about a hour long; (2) didn’t require reservations or a damned app or the like to access; and (3) most importantly, was something we could do sitting down, after a day of walking and more walking.

We made it for the noon tour. December 10 was as warm and clear a day in Winter Park as you could ask for, a reminder of why a couple of Victorian businessmen were able to found a town in central Florida and attract wealthy property buyers who aspired to escape the frozen North for a few months.

Our skipper for the tour.

Skipper Bob, let’s call him. He took us from the tour-boat dock on Lake Osceola through a couple of canals to Lake Mizell and Lake Virginia and then back, pointing out some of the posher estates and landmarks along the way, such as the posh boat houses that tend to come with such properties.

Bob also offered up some detail about the history of the area, most of it unfamiliar. I didn’t know, for example, that Fred Rogers was an alumnus of Rollins College, which occupies a sizable chunk of the Lake Virginia shore. I also learned that the college, even in our age of grossly inflated higher-ed tuition, outclasses most others in its high cost.

Out on the lakes, Bob revved up the engine from time to time, spurring the boat forward at a good clip. Wind famously blows long hair into a pleasantly billowing mass at such times, but under the warm sun and blue sky that day, even my shortish hair was picked up by the wind. Felt good.

I liked the passages through the canals. I don’t think I was alone in this.

and offering up some detail about the history of the area, most of it unfamiliar. I didn’t know, for example, that Fred Rogers was an alumnus of Rollins College, which occupies a sizable chunk of the Lake Virginia shore. I also learned that the college, even in our age of grossly inflated higher-ed tuition, outclasses most others in its high cost.

In most of the rest of the country, winter had arrived. In Winter Park, named for the season it is most unlike, you can pass through the tightly packed greenery luxuriating in warm air.

You’re up close to the yards of more modest, but still high-value real estate. Everyone’s got a dock.

The vantage means views of the canopy above.

After the boat tour, we walked a few pleasant blocks along Morse Blvd., away from the lake. This handsome church, First United Methodist, didn’t look open. Too bad.

The city is fond of its peafowl, I understand.

The downtown shopping street in Winter Park is Park Ave. On one side of the street are the likes of Bosphorous Turkish Cuisine, Williams-Sonoma, Ocean Blue Galleries, D’Anne Mica, Fannie Hillman + Associates real estate, Current by John Craig men’s clothing, The Imperial on Park wine bar and Be On Park Fine Jewelry. Life Is Good (registered trademark) products are available on the street.

the shopping side of the street are the likes of Bosphorous Turkish Cuisine, Williams-Sonoma, Ocean Blue Galleries, D'Anne Mica, Fannie Hillman + Associates real estate, Current by John Craig men's clothing, The Imperial on Park wine bar and Be On Park Fine Jewelry. Life Is Good (registered trademark) products are available on the street.

Across the street from the shops is Central Park. The developers were out, I think, to remind New Yorkers of home, but without the likelihood of snow or ice or blizzards like in ’88.

The Winter Park station on the SunRail commuter line is at the park, and a SunRail came while I was idling in the park. Amtrak stops there too.

The park was decorated for the holidays, of course. Including a phone booth.

A local tradition. You can call from the booth and leave a message for Santa Claus.

Florida ’25

Posted on December 28, 2025 by admin

Decorating for Christmas this year meant a rapid set-up. We spent a fair number of hours on the 23rd making the living room ready for a tree – moving clutter, mostly. On Christmas Eve, I brought the tree in from the garage, and Ann mostly decorated it. Finishing touches, by me, were in progress even on the morning of Christmas Day, but since that moment in the life of our family doesn’t involve an early-morning rush downstairs by children anticipating Santa’s bounty any more, that was doable.

Ann did a fine job of decorating, in the style of our family: fill up the tree with a wide variety of glowing and glinting objects accumulated across the decades.

We got a late start on decorating for Christmas, though when I think about, decorating after the Solstice discourages the sort of front-loading of Christmas that a lot of people complain about, but which they do anyway.

We had a good reason for the late start: a drive to Florida and back, beginning on December 4 and ending on the 22nd. Not just to Florida, but as far as you can go in that state, at least by car, namely to Key West and back. Early to mid-December seemed like a good time to do such a thing, after any traveling people do for Thanksgiving but before the worst of the Christmas-New Year’s rush. A short shoulder season in other words, but a good one, with room rates not quite subject to surge pricing, and crowds thick in some high-volume tourist destinations, but not impossible.

Also, Florida has few mosquitoes this time of year. Not no mosquitoes, as we found out one day in the southern reaches of the peninsula, just a “bearable” number.

Sometime earlier this year, I got the idea that I wanted to take four long drives after turning 64. Four for 64, you could say. Doing so by the end of 2025 wasn’t part of the idea, but that’s how things worked out. The drive to Florida and back, by way of such places as Indianapolis, Louisville, Chattanooga and Atlanta, totaled 3,682 miles. For all four trips since June, the total is about 14,300 miles.

That could be made to sound impressive, but in fact American men my age average more than that every year, about 15,000 miles, at least according to this source, which cites US DOT data. Younger men drive even more annually. Most of that is commuting, however. My commuting mileage by car has been exactly zero this year, and while I drive locally to stores and such, it couldn’t be more than a few thousand miles. So it seems clear that, as an American man, it was my duty to get out and drive.

When we headed south in early December, snow covered the ground all the way past Indianapolis, where we stopped for a few hours at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is part of a larger campus called Newfields – and better examined in summer, I think. But the museum is a good one, with a solid collection, especially 19th-century American and European works. Such as “Justitia,” a Morris & Co. work from the 1890s.

After overnighting south of Louisville, we diverted from I-65 and took smaller roads through southern Kentucky and into Tennessee to a holler in Jackson County, where we were the guests of dear friends. Tennessee musicians from those parts — some professional, others skilled amateurs — gathered on the the evening of Saturday the 6th, for one of the periodic jams in our friends’ barn, which houses no animals these days, but a small stage and some sound equipment and a fair number of folding chairs. A joyful jam it was. Food was potluck. I like to think we went to a hootenanny.

The road through the holler. By this point, no snow. We were trading cold for warmth. That was one of the goals of the trip. Maybe the main one.

From there it was mostly a straight shot down through Georgia on I-75 to Florida, and eventually US 27 to Orlando by way of non-coastal Florida places like Gainesville, Ocala and Lady Lake, a string of settlement less agricultural and less pastoral now than ever, more like an endless outer suburb. Heavy traffic is an invasive species in this part of Florida, surely as pythons are in damper parts of the state. Not just masses of cars and trucks, either, but also golf carts. We passed close enough to The Villages to see billboards advertising legal representation in the event of golf cart accidents. Carts, I’ve heard, provide transport in great numbers in that sprawl of a settlement.

The drive to and in Florida involved the usual North American mix of large and small roads, smooth and ragged, grid-like and irregular, though Florida cities tended toward the irregular (except for Key West), and as crowded as can be and as empty as can be. Snow lined the way up north, thinning out the further south we went, giving way to brown landscapes and bare trees. Then we came into greenery – evergreens and palms and even deciduous species turning color. We crossed mighty bridges over mighty rivers, small culverts over alligator haunts, and the string of bridges that make up the civil engineering marvel known as the Overseas Highway (US 1). We crossed barely acknowledged borders and signs at the Florida visitor center on I-75 proclaiming The Free State of Florida.

Florida Man was out and about, weaving in and out of high-speed traffic, pushing 100 and pretty sure that physics doesn’t apply to him, though I have to admit that Florida isn’t different from any other state in that way. Traffic stopped cold more than once: for a banged up, upside-down SUV; for a raging RV fire, attended by a half-dozen firemen; for a serious two- or maybe three-car wreck on the other side of a divided highway; for construction, usually without any workers in sight; and once for no reason that we could tell at all.

In Orlando, we spent all December 9 at Universal Epic Universe, a theme park that only opened in May. Ann flew in the day before we went to the park and flew home the day afterward, taking advantage of the low prices that discount airlines offer to high-volume places in a shoulder season, if you take no bags and buy nothing to eat or drink at sky-high prices, literally and figuratively. A small bag of hers had been stowed in our car for the visit.

A theme park is one thing, but I wanted a look at Orlando, at least a sliver of it, the next day. Ann’s flight was fairly late that day, so we were able to spend part of it in posh Winter Park, including a tour boat ride through the town’s small lakes, lush with greenery and expensive houses on their banks, and connected by canals.

A drive that included the stretch of US 41 that passes through the Everglades took us to Homestead, Florida, and the mid-century charms of The Floridian motel. A day in Everglades NP followed, including an airboat tour and a drive to the coast at Florida Bay. The next day, before leaving Homestead for a drive in the rain across the Overseas Highway to Key West and while the sun still shined, we toured the Coral Castle, a one-man construction project using 1,000 tons of oolite to make walls, carvings, stone furniture, and a castle tower.

Key West was a two-day, three-night mid-December ramble on the busy and less busy streets of Old Town, including humans but also chickens, taking in the likes of the Hemingway House, the Little White House, Mallory Square, the San Carlos Institute, the Key West Aquarium, and the Key West Cemetery. Also, tourist shops, boutiques and the building where Pan-Am was founded. We ate and drank, though as our wont, nothing alcoholic. Key West was decked out for the holidays but not over the top. We walked and walked some more. It felt like a couple of pleasant summer days.

From my 2014 visit, I knew that on the back streets near the little-visited cemetery, parking was possible on an otherwise cramped island. So it was. On Margaret Street, within sight of the cemetery.

The return drive took us up the eastern coast of Florida, but avoiding the worst traffic in Miami-Dade by taking Florida’s Turnpike. By December 17, we’d arrived in Orange Park, a large suburb of Jacksonville, for a stay with two other dear friends, former Austinites now in northern Florida. Part of the next day was in and near downtown Jacksonville, one of the larger U.S. cities I’d never visited before (I believe San Jose is now the largest on that list). During our downtown stroll, we encountered the coolest building in Jacksonville and certainly one of the coolest in Florida.

We quit Florida on the 19th, but weren’t quite done with the trip. Yuriko had never been to Atlanta and wanted to go. Though I’d been however many times since 1982, I was happy to oblige, so we spent two nights and a day there, using the day to see the astonishing Georgia Aquarium and the impressive but somewhat overpriced World of Coca-Cola.

The last legs of the trip were long drives: Atlanta to Elizabethtown, Kentucky; and from there to home the next day. I wasn’t about to let them be completely dull drives, so we stopped on the second-to-last day in Chattanooga, to see the conveniently located, blocks-from-the-highway Chattanooga Choo-Choo redevelopment. On the last day of the trip, we stopped in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and walked across the Big Four Bridge, a former RR bridge across the wide Ohio, now serving pedestrians and bicyclists.

Home and then — Christmas, when things slow down for a week or so. Good timing.

Nebraska 2

Posted on November 16, 2025 by admin

Which of these two destinations aren’t like the others?

That’s a beginner’s-level question. Better question: where can you find this pole, with mileages and – what units measure the distance to Heaven or Hell? – other signs?

Answer: Cairo, Nebraska.

Maybe a palm tree was in the works, but the city decided not to spend any more money. Cairo (pop. 822) is one of the small chain of small towns on the eastern section of the highway Nebraska 2, which runs westward and north of Grand Island. Cairo is the first place I stopped on my way west on that highway in early September.

Eventually the highway reaches the Nebraska National Forest and Grassland, a patch of (partly) wooded land that inspires the question, there’s a national forest in Nebraska?

West from the forest, Nebraska 2 crosses the Sandhills, an unusual place here in North America, with the land morphing from cropland to ranch land on sandy steppes. The towns on the way are mere hamlets, and sometimes not even that. On the western edge of the Sandhills, one comes to the sizable town of Alliance, Nebraska, home of Carhenge and railroad staging area for coal trains headed east.

Before I did the drive, I was looking forward to it as much as any of the roads in Colorado. It lived up to expectations. Nice when that happens.

The Fence Post cites Charles Kuralt’s fondness for Nebraska 2: “Highway 2 is not just another highway that goes somewhere. Highway 2 is somewhere,” he’s known to have said. I’d say whatever else his failings, Kuralt had good taste in roads.

Just outside Broken Bow (pop. 3,491), seat of Custer County and pretty much the only town of any size in that county, the Sandhills Journey Scenic Byway Visitor Center offers a building with bathrooms and pamphlets and displays and, for my visit at least, a grandmotherly and talkative volunteer. Old enough, she said, to remember when the highway was just a road through the countryside that attracted no attention from the outside world. Not a scenic byway, and sand hill cranes were just flocking birds. Now a trickle of tourists and bikers and RVers come this way. She had some solid recommendations, especially a good diner for lunch.

The visitor center grounds include a relocated (or was that reconstructed?) Sandhills cabin. The residences of the farmers trying to scratch out a living in the Sandhills, and finding out that no amount of scratching would make decent crops grow consistently from the land.

The Custer County Courthouse. Saturday, closed.

A block from the courthouse, some buildings around City Square Park.

City Square Park is a generic sort of name. Wonder whether there’s anyone from the town who can be honored by renaming the park? Looking at list of notables from Broken Bow, one instantly stands out.

This guy: Solomon Butcher.

Wiki: “Solomon D. Butcher (January 24, 1856 – March 18, 1927) was an itinerant photographer who spent most of his life in central Nebraska, in the Great Plains region of the United States… he began in 1886 to produce a photographic record of the history of European settlement in the region. Over 3,000 of his negatives survive; more than 1,000 of these depict sod houses.”

*Frederic Schreyer and family, Custer County, 1880s, by Solomon Butcher.*

Definitely name the park after Butcher, Broken Bow.

One more in that town. I couldn’t be bothered to get out of the car.

West of Broken Bow is Anselmo (pop. 145), home of this church, St. Anselms Catholic Church, nicknamed Cathedral of the Sandhills. Saturday, closed.

A more common sort of building, not far from the church.

Not the most imposing that I saw, but representative of the many structures like it. The grist of a photo collection. Of course it has been done. I’m pretty sure I saw a room of Bernd Becher’s photos of water towers at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Nebraska National Forest and Grassland is in an unexpected place, slap in the middle of Nebraska, not due to a freak of nature, but the efforts of human beings. Specifically, mass plantings of trees by the federal government for more than 100 years, beginning (not a surprise) during the administration of Teddy Roosevelt.

Near the national forest entrance is the Middle Loup River, broad but shallow, and crossable on a foot bridge.

I camped in the national forest. The campgrounds weren’t completely full, but there were more people than I expected for a remote spot in Nebraska. Then again, it was a Saturday night, and soon enough I figured out what brought most of them: the ATV trails. Not long after dawn on Sunday, the campers across from me – a man and a small knot of teenage boys – roared away in a small caravan of ATVs crusted with dust from the day before.

I packed up and sought out a quieter place. A national forest hill with a fire tower and some views. The tower was closed.

But the views were still pretty good.

West from the national forest, Nebraska 2 heads into the rolling grassland of the Sandhills proper. In the village of Thedford (pop. 208), varied public interpretations of the Sandhills are available for reading.

The terrain along the highway Nebraska 2 might seem monotonous to some. Too bad for them. You’re driving across a kind of ocean, terrain all wavy, except that it’s solid ground, marked by occasional trees or manmade structures, and side roads — trails — wandering deeper into the hills.

The handful of towns are really just wide places in the road. Sometimes, not even that.

Nebraska 2 parallels the BNSF line, which came first.

Note: I was standing on a public side road to take that picture, as I do with all my RR shots.

Eventually, I took the road to Alliance. But that was merely incidental. Out this far, the road, as Kuralt said, is the destination.

Five-State National Road Dash

Posted on November 13, 2025 by admin

Our first winterish weather blew through early this week, but we’re back to cool days. For now. Some leaves seem to be clinging a little longer than usual, but most are accumulating on the ground, as expected for November. A scattering of Christmas decorations are already up, and I don’t mean in stores, where they’ve been for weeks. Let November be November, I say.

Much of my return from the East Coast generally followed the westward course set by the National Road, though I didn’t use much of US 40, which has that nickname. If you want to make decent time, you take I-68 through Maryland and then I-70 across Ohio and into Indiana, which pretty much parallels the National Road.

The Interstate is designed for just that kind of efficient travel. On the whole, it delivers. The four-lane highways also deliver boring drives, to hear some tell it. That’s an erroneous assumption, to hear me tell it. The Interstate has its fine stretches, such as I-68 in October, a gloriously colorful drive. Winding and hilly, too, through Maryland’s peculiar panhandle.

A rest stop near Hancock, Maryland, offers views to the north, so most of what you see is Pennsylvania.

The rest stop is at Sideling Hill, an enormous rise gouged by an enormous cut for I-68 to go through. An impressive feat of engineering, completed only in the 1980s. Then again, blowing up mountains is a thing that happens in this part of the country.

The narrowest part of the Maryland isn’t far away. At its narrowest, there is less than two miles are between the Potomac and the Mason-Dixon Line. So if you picked up Maryland by the panhandle, it would surely break at that narrowest point.

I filled my gas tank off the highway in the last town in Maryland, Friendsville (pop. 438), at a station whose enclosed retail space (between a few pumps) seemed little bigger than a walk-in closet, and yet there was a clerk manning the place on Saturday just before dark. Rotund and massively bearded, he was playing a video game when I opened the door to pre-pay. He might have been a little surprised to encounter a customer, at least one who didn’t pay at the pump.

From there, I continued into West Virginia, then took I-79 north into Pennsylvania, then headed west on I-70, which crosses West Virginia’s odd panhandle – more like a periscope – before reaching Ohio. After overnighting in Cambridge, Ohio, I bypassed Columbus but stopped in Springfield, near Dayton but with a distinct geographic identity. Alcor to Dayton’s Mizar, you might say.

Downtown Springfield was practically devoid of pedestrians that Sunday, and not that many cars drove through either. A few buildings rise high enough to suggest a more prosperous past, but look too closely and some of them seem to be as empty as the streets, or at least underutilized.

The National Road went, and still goes through Springfield, in the form of US 40. A milestone in Springfield marks the point at which the federal government quit paying for further westward expansion of the road. Anything else would be on the states, namely Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

National Road Milestone, Springfield Ohio

Later, after the National Road had become History, the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a series of statues along the route, and others to the west: “Madonna of the Trail.”

National Road Madonna of the Trail, Springfield Ohio

There are 12, with the easternmost of them along the National Road. Erected in the late 1920s, the Springfield one was renovated about 20 years ago.

Nearby, passersby are urged to Dream Big.

About an hour west of Springfield, at the border of Ohio and Indiana on I-70 – just barely inside Indiana – is the Uranus Fudge Factory. I had to stop for that.

Sure, there’s fudge in there somewhere, but also a lot of gags involving the word Uranus (Your-anus). Examples can be found in the newspaper — an honest-to-God paper newspaper — that the store produces, The Uranus Examiner, and gives away. I have a copy. My kind of souvenir.

Sample front-page headlines from the Summer 2025 edition:

Breaking News: You Can Explore Uranus In Three Locations

Eating Their Way Through Uranus

Get A Lick Of Uranus

Sink Your Balls In Our Putt Holes

The second of those stories was about the 2nd Annual Eating Uranus Fudge Galactic Championship held at the Anderson, Indiana location in March. Apparently it was a Major League Eating-sanctioned event, and apparently MLE is a real thing. One Patrick Bertoletti won the 2nd championship at Uranus, putting away a bit more than nine pounds of fudge in about as many minutes.

Fudge is one thing, but mostly Uranus sells stuff. A lot of stuff.

The Richmond, Indiana location is the third of three for Uranus, and I think the only one with dinosaurs —

— and a 100-foot cross of corrugated steel over a metal frame.

Until about 10 years ago, the property belonged to New Creations Chapel, which also included a church building, boarding school for troubled teens and a Bible college. The ministry, for reasons its web site explains in some detail, sold the property to Uranus, including the cross.

Heading through Richmond, Indiana, I stopped at an entrance to a large park to check my map. Glen Miller Park. A colorful spot in October.

Not named after the bandleader, which would be Glenn Miller Park. “Glen Miller Park was established in 1885 and was named for Colonel John Ford Miller, who was a railroad executive during the late 1860s,” the city of Richmond says. “Colonel Miller bought the land from Nathaniel Hawkins in 1880, with the intention of transforming the land into a park.”

So Glen Miller as in glen, a term that evokes pleasant Scottish valleys. I was just about to be on my way when I noticed a statue.

It was another of the 12 Madonna of the Trail statues, located at the edge of the park, where it meets US 40. Unlike the earlier one in Springfield, I hadn’t sought it out. It was just there. One’s travels, like life, can be strange sometimes.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Flora