When I opened my eyes I was very thankful to see I was not in a Georgia jail cell. I can just hear the phone call to the wife now..Ah honey, can you fly down to Georgia and bail me out of prison?….this would immediately be followed by a click and a dial tone. Oh well their goes my one phone call. No thanks officer I am not really into working on a chain gang. Oh that’s not an option?…. Maybe I should stay in this town. You know what they say, once you have ruined your reputation your finally free to do whatever you want. On second thought I think I’ll just put on some dark sunglasses, a hat and slip out of town.
Florida as I am sure you all know is flat and for the most part ugly. My destination is Dunedin just north of Tampa. As I get near I pull off the interstate to travel about 10-15 miles to the coast. This entire portion of land is covered in concrete and contains a never-ending rotation of corporate retail crap. Whatever stores are in your town’s sprawl area they are here too. When they run out of them it just starts repeating again. Interspersed are planned communities of some type. All are behind concrete walls with names like Pelican Bay or Still Waters. They can be condos, mobile homes, townhouses or individual homes. People living in this big sea of concrete are immediately assaulted by bumper to bumper traffic the minute they edge out of their protected gates. It is extremely sad and disheartening to me that this is what has been allowed to happen to pretty much the entire state along the coast. Certainly true of all South Florida. I want to relate a story that I think is very telling. Many years ago we used to spend the winters in Florida in our moterhome. We had our young teenage kids with us. We were parked initially in one of these shopping plazas. It was evening and my son fell asleep. We were on our way across the state to the east coast. The next day he woke up and asked why we had not left. I said we did you slept through it. He looked out the window again and tried to make the argument by sighting the stores around us. OK, you get the point. It is all the same. Relentless and void of any interest or imagination. You can not really blame the very first areas for allowing this to happen. You know, sounds good to start with. The thing that is really troubling is once everyone saw how horrible this was they didn’t stop it. They just allowed the sprawl to slowly engulf the entire state. How in the world are you ever going to fix it now? And why do people still want to live in their walled world amidst it? I honestly don’t get it but that is just my opinion seems I am in a small minority.
Dunedin is not an oasis and there are plenty of places in Florida that are much nicer. Unfortunately the nicer the area the more money it takes to be there. I kinda like Sanibel Island, or Captiva, Jupiter Island, Boca Grande. Take Ft Lauderdale as an example. If you were really rich you could live in the area with the big beautiful homes with a boat and your dock. It would be great. I’d have some movie star or ball player as a neighbor. However with my income I would end up living under an overpass next to Joe’s pawn shop. I do have to be realistic. Dunedin is not on the beach it is on the bay. It does have a little original historic downtown area that is attractive and holds 5 or so restaurants, a great little dive bar called skips bar and grill, a dance hall etc. The surrounding town is very affordable. You can buy a little 2-bedroom place for $60,000 to $100,000 no problem. From what I can tell you can get a 6 month lease on one for about $950.00 an efficiency is probably half that. One of the other things that drew my attention is it has a paved bike trail running right through the center of town. You can live in Dunedin and never have to get in a car, which is a prerequisite to living anywhere in Florida for me. I just can not deal with the traffic bad for my mental health. There are also 2 great beaches only 5 miles away. Now these things are probably available in a many Florida locations. This is just one possibility.
I arrived parked the car and wandered into Skips for a beer. Very cool place if you are into dives. Skip must be a genius he is down at the end of the bar drinking beer with all his buddies swapping war stories while his highly efficient bartender handles the whole place and it is busy. How does she do it? Well the place only sells beer and wine. 4 drafts the rest of the choices are on ice in coolers. They only take cash. They have one meal a crockpot thing over rice. Simply genius, I am sure that Skip is a millionaire.
I strike up a conversation with the bartender. After pumping her for info on where the cheap hotels, housing and beach scene is I head out for a walk about. I like it overall. Has possibilities if I don’t have to drive anywhere. I find the hotel she told me about, one of those old motor court things. The owner is very friendly the place is nice and clean although it still comes in as the most expensive place I have stayed on the trip $89 the room has a kitchen in it. Be nice for an extended stay. I really need a power nap as I did not get back to my room last night till after 2am…zzzzzzzzz…around 7pm I go back to Skips for another and then go out to find some place for dinner. Eventually settling on some seafood place. I eat at the bar. The local girl who is bartending is a sweet heart talks about the area and keeps me company. I am still kinda beat from my long day so I head out early and call it a night.
