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For as much traveling as I’ve done in my life, I still get nervous every time I fly. Take-off used to freak me out, but after the bumpy winter ride back from the Keys, landing scares me more, watching day turn to night through small sheets of rain. Before boarding, I looked around at the other passengers, and their calm calmed me. People napping, listening to iPods, reading magazines. There is comfort in the ordinary. I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s what worked to get me through the ride – that, and taking pictures. I never tire of looking at cloud photos, and I don’t tire of taking them.
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It takes some convincing for Jeff to travel. He is more cautious than I am about money, and taking time away from his artwork for a gift of escapism. But once he’s there, he’s fully there, the man with three cameras swinging from his neck, wearing out the treads in his shoes from walking for hours to dig through residents’ trash. That’s what we love most: stealing away into quiet side streets, never knowing what we’ll find. It’s difficult though to find a quiet moment in Key West during high tourist season, but somehow we managed at South Beach, one of the most crowded places at sunset. It helps to arrive a few minutes late to your destination.
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Filed under: Florida | Tags: escape, key west, polaroid spectra, softtone film, time travel
staring at the sea
It is exhilarating and terrifying to stand at water’s edge, wind kicking at your back, knowing that you are at the southernmost point of the States. This is where borders melt into the ocean, no land for miles, a definitive endpoint. Jeff and I spent a beautiful week in the Keys with Sheryl and Rebby and Sheryl’s sister, Amanda, and sister-in-law Allison. We celebrated Sheryl and Rebby’s 10 year anniversary and a birthday with many rum drinks, a drag show, waking to rooster calls, breakfasts of tropical fruits with sweet pink Florida shrimps, lazing in the hot tub, finding pirate-eyed kitties and marveling that the icy, snowy world we left for a week had turned to days filled with sunshine.
tropic cinema
caroline street
a mysterious yellow house
saint mary star of the sea
an abandoned bible school
rooster
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Micanopy is swampland and live oak, a one-street town with no stop light. To get there requires driving down bumpy, dusty roads dotted with cottages painted bright colors, their roofs canopied in Spanish moss. For an afternoon, you can time-travel back about 80 years and forget the strip malls that take up a lot of central Florida space. It feels haunted; there are definitely ghosts walking these streets.
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When Jeff and I first married, I had the solitude talk with him: I must have ”Lisa time” now and then, don’t take it personally. And the best Lisa time are the mornings. There is an entire day in front of me filled with possibilities. There are errands to do, or better yet – not do. Which is why waking up early on vacation is even better. On our first day in Florida, I woke around seven. I don’t drink coffee or eat breakfast, I just start doing things because I may have dreamed about them – writing emails to friends, reading cookbooks, jotting down lines to stories. But that morning I took pictures around my in-laws house, chasing light from room to room. The gated community where they live is like a set from a film; even though I’ve visited many times now, I can’t recall ever seeing people outside. Which is why I felt pretty safe walking the streets in my pajamas, snapping photos of palm trees and dodging sprinklers before the family woke up and wondered where I had gone.
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One of the best feelings of being on the road is when you’ve crossed the border to your destination. Not there, but almost, and suddenly, the boomerang-shape on the map becomes Florida. You’ve been in the car all day through five states, you don’t even know what the outside temp is like, or what the song is on the radio. You have no idea what town you’re in or where you’re going to eat dinner before it gets dark. You pull over to a souvenir stand on Highway 301 to stretch your legs, maybe browse through aisles of neon tee-shirts and religious altars made of seashells. But it’s closed. There will be no promises of boiled peanuts, no snow globes studded with pink flamingos. The sun bounces off the shop windows, temporarily blinding you through your camera lens. A chorus of cicadas, the air swells with humidity. You are hundreds of miles from home.
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Filed under: Florida | Tags: alligators, coconut monkeys, florida, micanopy, oranges, souvenirs
My mother wanted us to bring back seashells for her from Florida, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her we were over 100 miles from a beach. I’m not a beachy kind of girl anyhow – give me a stark, wintery New England beach in December any day over a place where I risk getting baked to a crisp.
Lucky for us, there are Orange Souvenir Centers everywhere in central Florida – even one shaped liked the giant fruit so representative of the Sunshine State. It’s this compulsion of mine when we’re on the road anywhere that we must take a break at a truck stop to watch all the strange people passing through; and I have to stop at kitschy souvenir shops to see if painted plates and snow globes are still hot business (they are).
We settled for the alligator head instead — it’s more our style.
cocomonkeys
floridian gems
star motel
the 13-foot gator has seen better days
deathwish kitty of Micanopy
dolly
We bought one of these, but I'm sure that doesn't surprise you.
Filed under: Florida | Tags: cross creek, marjorie kinnan rawlings house, ocala, suburbia
Central Florida claims to be “The Real Florida.” Which makes me wonder which Florida is the imposter?
We spent most of our time in Ocala, where my in-laws live in a gated retirement community. It was difficult to explain to them my obsession with photographing the symmetry of their neighborhood, all the driveways and mailboxes lined up in pristine rows. Tiny sprinklers watering the lawns like clockwork each morning, the humidity stifling before the sun rose.
airplane
And when we needed a break, we headed to Cross Creek, possibly the “real Florida” – whatever it means to have a place be the definitive icon of an entire state – where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings escaped to write The Yearling. I try to find something good about every place I visit, even if it’s not a place I would have chosen on my own; sometimes “it is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind.” And forget about the mosquitoes and Disney World and all the strip malls dotting the highways that got us there.
suburban road
cross creek road
what she found there
dinner bell. photo by jeff.
storm over cross creek
ocala
Filed under: Florida | Tags: americana, florida, hawthorne, route 301, taxidermy, tony's
We spotted it across Route 301 on our way to Ocala: FREE TAXIDERMY MUSEUM. I jotted it down in my trusty notebook (yes, I keep lists of places we see of interest along the way, compulsive organizer that I am) and tried like hell to find this place via Google. No worries – we just drove back the way we arrived a few days later.
mama alligator and baby
Housed in a former motel, Tony’s is more of a gallery than a museum since all mounted pieces are for potential sale. We were expecting Norman Bates-creepy, but the yard was surprisingly lush and inviting, with pink flowers and long green grass. We walked to the side of the building and pushed open the door. It was dark inside, but we could see the outline of elephant tusks protruding from the back wall. A tiny bell tinkled and a woman with a red beehive flicked on some lights for us. “Look around, spend as much time as you like,” she said and left us alone with the once-wild beasts.
albino snake
a dik dik
rawr
mr. zebra
the museum
our souvenir: a Tony's business card
