Your travel agent doesn't have any deals for these places but, this is Florida.
A spring that feeds into the Swanee river. It's actually two pools with a cave that connects them. The Northern part of the state sits on a spongy mixture of sand, clay and roots...over a honeycomb of caves and underwater rivers. Sink holes are a common problem.
Don't know what's up with the date...it's an old camera.
There's Bambi.
Blue Springs on the Withacochee. Even I can remember before it became a State Park and you could dive out of the trees.
Not anymore. This is, as the sign says, the Real Florida...a state full of bureaucratic fundamentalists. I don't know what that jibbersh means and for the life of me I can't understand why anyone would think I'd have access to it.
Over the decades, a certain group of people have come down and invaded Florida and tried to shape it into the sorta busy-body nanny states they come from. You can't smoke at the Yella Pine Truck Stop because some lady from New Jersey, down in Boca Raton can't sleep at night thinkin' about it.
I love to visit, I was born there, but you couldn't drag me there to live.
I feel the same about Essex, except I don't love to visit Essex.
ReplyDeleteThe saving grace for the place is that North Florida (and I will forever have been born in NORTH Florida...and to put a finer point on it my people are from Georgia) is still very much a Southern place.
ReplyDeleteIt's just that the population of South Florida is so massive they can pretty much force any issue they like...there would never be a ban on smoking in BARS, for instance, if it was up to the people of Bagdad Fl.
Just example of this phenomenon and how it works in the minds "the rest of the country," as they are always referring to themselves. Right after the 2000 Presidential election, I was joking with a professor of mine (a yankee of course...they all were)about spoiled ballots in Florida..."if these people can't push a stick through a piece of paper maybe they don't need to be voting."
Him "No no these were educated people in South Florida, from the Northeast not..." he stopped himself when he realized what he was about to say...not North Florida rednecks like my family.
Just for the record in Madison county, unapologetically redneck Madison county, all of 2 ballots were spoiled.
Do you get to swim with the alligators?
ReplyDeleteOn another note - just finished watching the first two parts of a three part Adam Curtis documentary on the BBC called ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE. Curtis is one of the more interesting, as well as divisive, documentary makers that comment on society - don't know if you can watch the BBC player outside the UK, but here are links to the first two vidoes:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011k45f
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011lvb9
Only when I used to throw golf clubs in ponds. Actually yes...at Wakulaa Springs (I think maybe the largest fresh water spring in the world...certainly the coldest) they have people in boats that run them off when they get to close.
ReplyDeleteI'll check 'em out.
If you're digging around in the Adam Curtis vaults, be sure and watch the documentary about the 1969 office Christmas party. Proof that there were several very different strands to the Swinging Sixties in London.
ReplyDeleteFascinated by the North-v-South Florida stuff. Sounds just like Yorkshire!
Now I'm really bent. I can't watch it.
ReplyDeleteI regularly listen to Melvyn Bragg's show (Battle of Stanford Bridge today) but,
I can't watch this one.
Frickin' BBC.
There will be more about this Florida business...it's a recurring theme. There's a parade in Tallahassee every year...Springtime Tallahassee.
It was started because by the late 60's the folks in South Florida didn't think "their" capital should be in a "redneck town like Tallahassee"...and, typical of their kind, that's one of the more pleasant things that was said.
It was a way to advertise what a pleasant place Tallahassee was (they also finagled a twenty story capital building...the cost of which ensured that it wouldn't be moving any time soon)...as if it was necessary or, that the target audience could even recognize such a concept.