Driving to Florida

In 1986 my partner and I took a Florida vacation. We transported a car and flew back, staying at a Gulf-side beachfront condo while there.


We left after work on a Friday, driving as far as mid-Ohio the first evening before finding a hotel to stop for the night. The next day we drove from Lima, Ohio, into Kentucky before stopping for lunch in Covington. It was interesting to get into Kentucky, this first time in visiting the state for me, and immediately running into a different geography - steeply pitched hills - and cultrual and language differences - car license plates are "tags", and pop is "soda". And the accent becomes obvious. (Of course, we midwesterners think we are the only people without accents - I am sure that is a universal belief.)

It was amusing to see signs on bridges saying "Bridge may ice in cold weather". To northern midwesterners, this was stating the obvious, but apparently Kentuckians have to be warned. We found the "Falling Rock Zone" signs more interesting - not something one worries about in Michigan, but a good thing to think about in the mountains.


We made it through both Kentucky and Tennessee that day, stopping for the night in Chattanooga, TN, a stone's throw from the Tennessee-Georgia state line. I would say that this was the prettiest day of the trip and probably the most memorable for me just for the scenery.


We left Chattanooga on day three and stopped for breakfast once we got into Georgia, at a place called Waffle House. These are common off the freeways in Georgia and northern Florida and are good old southern cooking in a diner setting. When we walked in, everyone yelled "Good Morning!" - the waitresses, the fry cooks - which was off-putting for us. And we had new things - grits, which I found I liked very much, and raisin toast with cinnamon apple butter. Good stuff.

The soil as we drove through Georgia was reddish-brown, and so, oddly, was the asphalt. And this was the first time I witnessed a person driving with a paperback book propped on his steering wheel. Hmm. These days people talk or text on cell phones while driving, but I had never seen anyone reading a book while driving. Fortunately I haven't seen it often again.

We drove straight through Georgia and stopped in Valdosta for an early dinner. We didn't pick a good restaurant and it was obviously too early for dinner as far as the staff were concerned, so we didn't get very good service. We were the only customers in the place.

We finished the drive to the condo in the Tampa/St. Pete area and arrived about 9:30 pm. Late dinner that night was from 7-11.

The condo was in the Gulf Beaches, a stip of land which wraps around the coastline, about wide enough for a street with buildings on either side of it. Quite unusual.

The condo itself was beautiful, though rather obviously done by a decorator, Everything was in a motif of sea shells and wicker and palm trees. There were sea shell soaps in a shell-shaped soap dish in the bath, sea shell covers over the night lights, a conch shell on the refridgerator, a sand dollar on the coffeemaker. Shell prints on the sheets and on the wallpaper - well, okay, it was a beachfront condo overlooking the gulf. But it was nice - two bedrooms, two baths, a balcony off the living room and master bedroom that faced the gulf. We went to bed that night with the balcony doors open so we could hear the sounds of the ocean waves on the shore - low 60s with a breeze. Nice way to spend a December vacation.

What we did over the next few days was relaxing and fairly typical. We shopped, cooked and ate a lot of seafood, and spent time on the beach (my first experience with salt water swimming). Beach sand in Florida is like talcum, not like sand on the Great Lakes which results from rocks ground down by glaciers. In Florida, it feels like the sand has come from shell and coral. It has a completely different texture.

We picked up a lot of shells to clean and take home with us. When we left them on the kitchen counter before washing, a couple of them moved! That was startling. Of course the shells were homes to hermit crabs. We returned the occupied ones to the beach.

Two days we spent at Disney World. At this time, Magic Kingdom and Epcot were the only theme parks they had - at least, those were the ones we visited. The first day we did Magic Kingdom, which resembled any theme park. (The one we knew best was Cedar Point, which we had both visited in Ohio previously.) At that point in my life, I was a big roller coaster fan (I still am but since my spinal surgery, it's not a good idea). Anyway, we did Space Mountain which was the first time I had ridden an indoor coaster. It's a very different experience and not one I really liked - I would rather see what's coming as part of the fun. We also tried the coaster in Frontierland, which was great. Waterfalls, good hills. Still, Magic Kingdom was just another theme park really, not bad but not great.

The second day we spent at Epcot. That was a new experience for us. We hadn't done this before, where you ride through the exhibits and things move and talk to you and make sounds. That was really interesting. My favorite was Journey Into Imagination, about art and creativity. Also good was Horizons, showing imagined future living in an urban home, a desert farm home, and an undersea home. Spaceship Earth traced the history of communication, and The World of Motion did transportation. Another favorite was The Living Seas, a trip to "Sea Base Alpha" where you pass by huge aquarium tanks that have sharks, dolphins, rays, corals, aneomes, and more. Beautiful.

The second part of Epcot had areas of various nations, but we never made it that far. The front part used up our whole day and we were satisfied with that.

We spent three more days at the condo before flying home on Monday. We had arranged for a cab to the Tampa airport. It was an odd airport at the time - very dark and gloomy. Also, I found it interesting, when I went looking for a pack of gum to help with the air pressure in my ears on the flight, that it was an airport policy at the time not to sell chewing gum. I thought that was really wierd.

It was an excellent trip, and has made it onto my list of ideal vacations - sitting on the beach. Again, I have not repeated the vacation, although I did get to Orlando recently for a conference at Disney World. But that didn't involve any beach sitting.