South to Florida

6 February, Savannah, GA.

Just love Savannah! This is our third visit. The beautiful squares with their grand old houses are still the same, River St with its bars restaurants and shopping is still trendy and the weather is still great. What made this trip different was staying in the centre of town. It’s always exciting to walk out of your accommodation right into the middle of things.

 

So….

There are some other travel issues that we need to clarify at this point.

Many people wonder how we are able to spend so much time travelling.

No were aren’t gallivanting millionaires spending up our children’s inheritance. Well maybe the last has some truth to it. The fact is that on most trips, once the initial airfares are covered, we live on what we live on at home, or when in Asia and the USA, much less!

So how is this miracle achieved?

Firstly we have been doing this for a long time, over 3 years ‘on the road’ in various countries including Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia and the USA over a period of nearly 40 years. It has to be said at this point that in more recent times, the most expensive of our travels have been at home in Australia.

Here in the US, the formula is simple; hire a car on a long term contract, anything more than a month brings the price down significantly, get the smallest vehicle that will take you and your luggage, buy gear to allow you to cook your own meals in motels, use motel coupon deals and stay in cheap chain motels and if possible pre-purchase currency when the exchange rates are favourable.

Everybody has different travel styles and preferences. We prefer to travel independently and for long periods of time. What works for us may not work for everybody, but to all those who are sure we have a money tree in the back yard, that’s how it’s done!

 

Friday 7 February, Jacksonville, Florida.

Took a leisurely cruise through southern Georgia and the very north of Florida today. Live Oak trees draped in Spanish moss met overhead on some of the side roads, giving the whole scene a touch of the southern swamps. The temperature was not as steamy as it should have been to fill out the image, but with vine-covered, deserted houses and the odd wrecked car, all that was missing was the twang of the banjos.

On the Georgia side of the state line there was very little traffic, but once we crossed into Florida things picked up substantially. We usually stop off at the State Welcome Centres when we cross borders to grab a few books of motel coupons to cash in on a few motel bargains. At the Florida centre, the number of old folk, and we mean OLD, was overwhelming! Some of these “gerries” are piloting RVs (motorhomes) the size of coach buses down the Interstate at speeds that would curl your hair! Lord knows how some of them can even climb up into the cabin.

Noticeable among older Americans, even those our age, is the number of people with serious knee and hip problems. In many cases weight has a lot to do with the problem, but we often wonder if many people just have to put up with their ailments because the cost of surgery is beyond their means.

We scored a free night on our motel rewards card tonight so we are tucked into a very nice king suite on the outskirts of Jacksonville. The room would be at least four times the size of most of the Japanese hotel rooms we have frequented.

Just for the trivia buffs: Jacksonville Florida is the largest city by area in the lower 48 states. The largest in the whole USA is..... Anchorage, Alaska.

 

Sunday, 9 February, Titusville, FL

Mostly miserable and rainy yesterday, so we did what most locals seem to do under such circumstances. We hit the Outlet Mall. Prices of quality clothing in the USA are normally obscenely cheap by Australian standards. Outlet prices are just jaw dropping. So we shed the bad weather blues with a major restock of clothing. We have learnt our lesson and bring an empty bag each when we come to the US.

Bright sunshine greeted us this morning. Our motel choice for the night was a giant hit, a three star winner. Cheap, co-located with an iHop (pancake café) and right beside the St Augustine Outlet Mall. What more could a girl ask for?

We had left Florida off our agenda on previous trips because we imagined it would be too much like home. In some aspects this has proven true so far, but there are enough differences to make the trip a winner.

From Jacksonville south for the 200 odd kilometres we have travelled over the past couple of days, it is very South-East Queensland/Northern NSW like in many ways. Very green, great beaches and that surfside feel generated by holiday condos, surf shops, and people in ultra-casual clothes. What is different from this perspective is the scale! Luxury beach front houses are beyond enormous and there are thousands of them. Areas of beach bungalows still exist and they are much like older areas of the Gold Coast. While the high rise blocks are not as concentrated, nor as high as those on the Gold Coast, they go on and on and on for well more than 100kms in this part of Florida. There is enormous wealth in this part of the country, in sharp contrast to states like Mississippi and Alabama.

The beaches are great, white sand and we guess reasonable surf, although it was a bit choppy today. The atmosphere is very laid back although the average age of the people on the street may have something to do with the pace of life. Florida is of course the US’s retirement mecca.

There are some significant historical and cultural differences that also make Florida interesting. The Spanish first settled here in the 16^th Century and Florida was at various times also British and of course American. After centuries of conquest and counter conquest, the matter was finally settled in the same way as the US settled much of its territorial acquisitions - they bought Florida for $5 million from the Spanish in 1821. The connection with the English is also an interesting one. None other than Sir Francis Drake sacked and burned the town of St Augustine, FL. in 1586.

 

 

 

 

Our visit to Castillo de San Marcos in St Augustine emphasised the long and complex history of Florida. This enormous structure was commenced in 1672, making it one of the oldest structures in North America. Through its 335 year history, the fort was never taken by force. However, in that time it was occupied by the Spanish, the British, the Confederate and Union Armies, and the US Army during the Spanish American War, the First World War and the Second World War.

The town of St Augustine is said to be the oldest town in North America, though we believe we have heard that claim before. The old centre of the town today is a quaint mix of authentic and nouveaux colonial buildings. It all works well. The atmosphere is more than a little touristy, but the feel of the old town can still be felt if one exercises a little imagination.

Even here in the north of Florida, the Spanish influence is felt. Spanish is widely spoken on the street and restaurants and street names reflect the Spanish influence. As we move further south we expect this influence to strengthen due to the large number of Cuban immigrants.

 

10 February, Melbourne, FL.

No wonder there are so many out of state licence plates in the supermarket car parks here! It was 25C today and tomorrow the minimum will be 18C and the maximum 28C. If we lived in the northern states where the winter maximums are routinely well below zero, we would be down here too!

Since we were kids, space exploration has been a big thing. It seems the current generation takes it all for granted or somehow they have morphed the reality of space travel with the fiction of Star Wars and Star Trek. For us, events like the Sputnik flight in 1956 were in real life. One of us can even remember sitting in the front yard watching for early space flights by both the Russians and the Americans. The moon landing occurred when we were in High School and the first Shuttle flights while we were at university.

So...

Imagine our excitement at seeing where it all happened! Cape Canaveral and the John F Kennedy Space Centre. JFK’s Space Centre puts on a great show! Americans really do this stuff well - heroic space music, spectacular audio visual displays and the real stars of the show, some of the original equipment, like Saturn rockets, Gemini Space Capsules and the main attraction, the Atlantis Space Shuttle. There was a lot of Ra, Ra, America, but in this field, as in many others, they deserve it!

 

 

 

To top off the day we even saw a couple of gators in the drainage ditches. Apparently there are more than 3500 of the critters on the Space Centre property. Not sure if the ones we saw were big ones? Northern Territory crocs would munch them up for a pre-lunch snack!

 

11 February, Hollywood, FL.

US 41/91, the highway that runs alongside the enormous Lake Okeechobee was shown as a scenic route on our map so, always up for a bit of different scenery, we headed inland for a day away from the never-ending beaches of Eastern Florida. What a disappointment! The lake was edged with a levee bank and so was not visible from the road. The whole area around the lake was far from isolated and definitely not scenic. RV Park after RV Park lined both sides of the road, although in the breaks between parks, a few small farms provided at least some interest.

By lunchtime we had seen enough and headed back to the beaches. Palm Beach was where we hit the coast. Oh my! More multi-million dollar mansions. It is probably a sin in the US to talk about ‘ostentatious wealth,’ but please! How can one family, or even several families need so much space? Apparently Gordon Gekko was right; ‘Greed IS Good’.

 

Greater Miami-Fort Lauderdale has a real LA feel to it. Crowded freeways, crazy traffic and heavily urbanized. The city is strung out for more than 200 kms along the coast. Drivers here are not as good as in most other US cities, where most are courteous and skilled. Here, many are erratic, aggressive and non-attentive. We have a theory to explain why driving is so bad here when it is generally very good elsewhere. If you can’t figure it out, think about what sorts of stereotypes fit with our description of the drivers!