Florida holds rich experiences — but prepare for manatee pace
I found the merch a bit lacking, though. No “I Choo Choo Choose You” valentines and no boxes of Krusty O’s (presumably because of the one jagged metal Krusty O inside).
We ran into some friends from the old daycare days at Universal. They were going to Walt Disney World next because they love their children and hate themselves.
I don’t know what else to say about Universal. My previous experience at Disney World had me girded for an all-consuming unpleasant experience. But I found it endurable right up to the point that a cheapjack Mardi Gras parade near closing time prohibited us from getting to the exit.
Park tip: Don’t do the services where they deliver your Universal gift-shop purchases to your hotel. Two months after our visit my wife received a phone call.
“Hello! It’s Rhonda (her name wasn’t Rhonda) at the Cabana Bay Resort. We were wondering if you were coming to pick up your purchases!”
No, Rhonda. We are not.
Day 5: Tuesday
The paths out of Orlando move faster than those going into the city, so we moved like a manatee being chased by another manatee. That emboldened me to stop by the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts in nearby Eatonville. It’s less a museum than an arts organization with some information on the author. But Eatonville was the first all-black city to be incorporated in the U.S. The history vegetables tasted good after a day fattening up at Universal.
We set out for Miami, stopping briefly at Mar-a-Lago for a photo.
Afternoon traffic along the coast on the east side of Florida moved like a manatee through a fishing net. Knowing much of the drive through the Florida Keys was two lane and often congested, we decided to stop and eat, and then spend Tuesday night making that drive rather than doing it when the bridges were stacked with cars. Upshot: no traffic. Downside: You don’t really get to appreciate the bountiful blue view when on an island-hopping drive in the dark. Still, we arrived in Key West in time to get a good night’s sleep so we could maximize the quantity of key lime pie the next day.
Day 6: Wednesday
For such a little island, Key West offers a lot, even if your goals do not include bar hopping. The Ernest Hemingway home is a treasure among literary destinations and well worth the visit. The docent tours are recommended, as they come with stories about the author and his ex-wives, tales built around a swimming pool and a penny. The lighter side of life with an alcoholic genius.
We also enjoyed the Little White House, Harry S. Truman’s Key West escape, which provided some enlightening insight into the life and work of the 33rd president.
Sufficiently full of nutritional historical tourism, we considered the matter of the pie. Among the four (!) pieces of key lime pie we sampled, my favorite was at Blue Heaven, a delightful foundation of citric wonder holding up a gravitydefying pompadour of meringue.
We popped by Books & Books, because my wife considers its owner, author Judy Blume, to be something like family. With the precision timing of a ride at Universal, a cyclist pulled up to the shop and pulled off her helmet, revealing herself to be Blume. This created a rare moment of speechlessness for my wife.
Day 7: Thursday
The drive out of Key West was not at all congested and lovely on a bright, blue day. We drifted up to Miami and enjoyed about as much South Beach as I could with the white-knuckle driving as drunken pedestrians staggered into the streets like zombies in a video game.
After stopping to view a few key art deco structures from the ’80s heyday of “Miami Vice,” we wandered to Little Havana, which offered the best food of the entire trip and enough street music to make me forget we still had nearly 1,200 miles to go.
Heading out of Little Havana, we found the lodging options were scant since we weren’t looking for hourly accommodations. That left us with the Miccosukee Resort & Gaming, a casino on the outskirts of the Everglades that offered a smoke-free room that smelled like an ashtray.
Day 8: Friday, again
The advantage to MiccoSmokee was its proximity to the Everglades. The “resort” sits two right-hand turns and a few hundred feet from Highway 41, which crosses the national park, and the earlier you get on the road, the more active the birds are. That drive was the rare case of manatee pace providing some reward. I’m no birder, but our checklist included some egrets, herons, hawks, spoonbills and possibly a stork.
We cut north to St. Petersburg for the Dalí Museum, which is a remarkable building and art collection regardless of one’s opinion on Dalí’s work. I found the stop to be a revelation, learning that his distinctive artistic approach was a response to being rejected by the avant-garde painters of his day. Rejected as novelty by the club he wished to join, he then created his own weird club. Dalí looked back to the Romantics, taking an old-school approach to art but viewing it through his own bizarre prism.
Day 9: Saturday, again
We awoke in Venice for the second time in a week. A thousand miles separated us from Houston. That distance wasn’t sufficiently daunting to prevent me from stopping at the International Independent Showman’s Museum in Riverview, not too far from Tampa.
The thing is, I love a good sideshow and/or circus.
Doc Rivera runs this wonderful institution, built around copious quantities of ephemera he collected from decades past. Nearby Gibsonton was where circus performers and crew would winter. It was also the kind of place where Al Tomaini, a 350-pound giant, might meet and fall in love with his wife, Jeanie, who was born without legs and thus only 2½ feet tall. The Monkey Boy, Lobster Boy, the Viking Giant — their ghosts are all here, and Rivera’s museum offers brilliantly colored documentation of their days.
He’s among the last living links to those times, a next-gen son of a showman whose affinity for the people involved in the shows and the shows themselves is infectious. “Once I’m gone, this probably goes with me,” he said.
Rivera is happy to let you guide your own tour, but it’s worth engaging him about the artifacts. He’s an encyclopedia, telling stories in the crisp, measured tone of a ’70s news anchor, seasoned by a lifetime of cigarettes.
With that, I was done. My wife thought we needed to make one more stop, which is how we ended up watching a live-action production of “The Little Mermaid” that was closer to the Hans Christian Anderson original than the Disney reinterpretation.
Weeki Wachee Springs is a fascinating little corner of the country, a hybrid of man-made and natural water park that doesn’t appear to have been updated since Watergate. And though it’s easy to scoff at such an outdated relic, this state park draws a crowd with family-friendly prices (the three of us cost a shade over $30) and by welcoming outside food and drink.
On a hot day, it provided cool refuge and confirmation of Florida’s strange state of being caught between then and now, between high-end modern entertainment and more rudimentary joys.
We headed back toward I-10 by taking a smaller, slower road that hugged the Gulf for a few hours. Ours was a manatee pace, but after a week tracing the perimeter of the state, slowing down a bit felt comfortable.