Florida Calling
My kids all love theme parks and especially so Disney World and Disneyland. I have many stories from their youth to depict this passion for a fun day of rides, lines and mediocre food, but none quite reaches up to the heights of my daughter’s honeymoon. As the dutiful father of the bride, I gave them two weeks in Tahiti, thinking that would be an ideal spot post-nuptial. I should have remembered that these were the two who got engaged at Disney World. My daughter sheepishly asked me if she could trade the second week in Tahiti for a week at Disneyland. What’s a father to do, but agree to spend less money to give his daughter even more joy. I was last at Disney World eight or nine years ago when we spent the holidays at Fernandina Beach and chose to go to Epcot for New Years Eve. Big mistake. All I remember was that it took the entire night to work our way around the jam-packed Epcot Lake to get the hell out after the fireworks at Midnight. I am far less a fan of theme parks and Disney than my children are.
Kim has a pal Lennie who is Mr. Cabaret on the NYC scene. They have been friends for a dozen years and Lennie, who is gay, is known to us a Kim’s Cabaret Husband. They do shows together and sit ob boards together and do general musical theater and cabaret stuff together. I like Lennie. He is a regular visitor in our guest room out here and his sense of humor has grown on me over the years. Well, Lennie turns 60 years old in 2022 (that’s right, Kim is involved with a younger man) and he is planning to hold his big celebration at Disney World. You see, Lennie goes to Disney EVERY year and stays for 10-15 days at a clip. He tends to take an entourage with him of cabaret followers and as a member of his inner circle, Kim has gone many times. If I ever do go to Disney, I go for a day at most. More than that is “shoot me now” time. Lennie, on the other hand, can’t seem to get enough and even sports a tattoo on his calf oof his pal, Mickey Mouse.
Lennie is combining his annual pilgrimage and his noteworthy birthday celebration into one grand trip to Disney in January. Kim needs to be there. That got me thinking. First of all, I would like to honor Lennie and be there or at least show the flag, so to speak. Because I cannot tolerate so much of the crazy mouse and his pals, I am planning a brief salute to Lennie and then, while Kim rides the teacups with her Cabaret Husband and friends, I am orchestrating a visit to all my friends who either winter in Florida or have redomiciled there for tax purposes. The list is quite long and luckily it tends to be focused on the East Coast from Daytona Beach down to Delray Beach and everywhere in between. That 200-mile stretch is called the Treasure Coast and misses Miami to the south and Jacksonville to the north.
I will rent a car in Orlando, which is our point of embarkation and disembarkation for this little visit. I have already locked in accommodations with friends along the route so that I will be able to see almost everyone for some version of breakfast, lunch or dinner. I feel that it is all very efficient and a good use of the time for me while Kim will be spending her time in the Magic Kingdom. After I have covered visiting from Brevard to Palm Beach Counties, I will return to Orlando to rescue Kim from Lennie’s clutches and whisk her off to Daytona Beach for a two-night stay with out friends the O’Connells, who made moved north to that town to be closer to one of their kids who lives in Ocala. I am sure there are lots of subtle differences among the towns that litter the six counties of the Treasure Coast, but I have this vision of them all being alike in their orientation to the water and their two-for-one early-bird dinner specials for local retirees. I am sure my sense is horribly biased and I can equally assure you that San Diego is not so very different, but that is my impression of the area.
I feel like San Diego has a wide diversity of geography. We have lovely coastal areas with pristine beaches like the Treasure Coast, but we also have mountains, high chaparral, desert and everything in between. The whole place is not sub-tropical as all of Florida is, ranging from inland swamps to coastal marshes (I, for one, do not acknowledge a vast difference). There are no mountains or deserts. You cannot go from snow to warm beach in a few hours like you can here. There are not great motorcycle roads, but rather long straight, flat stretches of road to get you north/south or east/west. I remember having a negatively biased sense of what Nëw Jersey is like and then some friends showed me how special some parts of the Garden State can be. I am sure it is the same for Florida, but I doubt that will change by preference to stay as far away from the bug-crawling, mosquito-buzzing, gator-stalking tropics of Florida.
Where everyone who doesn’t live in California thinks this state is all about earthquakes, mudslides and now wildfires, Florida has a different set of plagues. Obviously that’s not the case with California just like its unlikely that all of Florida is no more than one big Reptile World Attraction. Nonetheless, one of the many things that makes Kim and me so compatible is that we hold a similar view of Florida as a place where elephants go to die. That’s a bold statement from someone who lives only a few miles from the San Diego Zoo Safari Park.
So I will pack my swimsuit and keep my mouth shut during my trip and try to Beas gracious as possible. There are a lot of people I like who have chosen to live at least a part of their lives in the Sunshine State. I find myself wondering where the next few generations of affluent Americans will choose to live out their retirement days. Florida has a checkered past at best. It remained a frontier and rather savage land well into the mid-Nineteenth Century. It only attained statehood in 1845 and was the 27th state only soon to join the Confederacy given its relatively large proportion of slave labor working the plantations. The truth is that the state went largely undeveloped and unpopulated until after WWII with the advent of air conditioning. That means it has really only had about seventy years to become the retirement haven it has. With Climate Change putting the crosshairs directly on the low-lying state, there are few post-Baby Boomers who will find that moving to a place with submerging and shrinking landmass will be perhaps even less desirable than facing the hot, arid land of wildfires out here in the West.
I read in the Washington Post yesterday about how badly the Pacific Northwest if faring with Climate Change. It is apparently becoming a desert to rival those of the great Southwest. The Great Plains of the Midwest may not be in any better shape with all the flooding, tornadoes and now these nasty derechos. I am sure that Gen X and Y will figure it all out and while I am not sure Southern California will make it onto the preferred places list, I am ready to bet the ranch that no one is going to want to live in Florida in a few years. In the meantime, I will go visit my friends on the Treasure Coast since Florida is calling me (thanks to Lennie), and I will keep my mouth shut as people in flammable houses should not throw matches.