Hi, friends!
I was in the Florida panhandle last week for a vacation that seemed like a much better idea when we planned it in April.
But I digress.
Here are some observations. For reference, last time I had been to the panhandle was around 2013.
- Mullets are unironically back in style among tourists and locals.
- Trump propaganda shit is still for sale. There were a few shops I was about to buy stuff and then was like NOPE YOU DON’T GET MY MONEY
- Lots of those fucking morons love Ron DeSantis enough to have cutouts of him with the slogan like “DeSantis 2024 Make America Florida”
- Motherfuckers still harass dolphins on their jet skis. Dolphins are smart enough to stop swimming close to shore. To be honest, since those motherfuckers were doing that the last time I was in Florida, I didn’t expect to see any dolphins from the balcony at all. All I can assume now is the dolphins are plotting something and I for one support the rule of our potential cetacean overlords.
- The Gulf of Mexico was just as choppy and murky as I remembered. I thought perhaps once I started taking cruises and seeing Caribbean beaches maybe I was unfairly remembering the Gulf of Mexico. NOPE.
- My group definitely did not expect people to be even less masked up than Missouri, but whoo boy were we wrong.
- We all got covid tests after getting back since we felt like we’d be prime candidates for asymptomatic vaccine breakthrough covid infections. Surprisingly, we all came back negative.
Feel free to share any recent travel observations or anything even tangentially related to Florida.
We used to own a small place in Florida. This doesn’t sound promising, does it? Oh but it was. It was a 1-bedroom + den (with pullout couch) in South Beach that we bought for peanuts. Miami, especially South Beach, has these incredible price swings and we got in at a good time. South Beach is to Florida north of Palm Beach as New York is to anything south of DC’s suburbs. We loved going there. Problem is it sat vacant when we (or friends we loaned it to) weren’t there, and we always felt a little guilty going anywhere but there for a vacation. One fine day the realtor who sold it to us called and said he had a client who was buying individual apartments as rental investments and would we be interested in selling? We did. We got 6X what we paid for it, all-cash offering.
Who knows what that apartment is worth now, with the pandemic- and tax-related Great Migration to the Sunshine State.
That’s awesome! I’m glad you had such good returns on your property when you sold it.
It was very good but we didn’t come from members of the second-home-owning class, so we felt tied to it in a way. We had so much fun down there though. It does help if you speak Spanish. I used to haunt the Publix and I’d pigeon-hole a stocker sometimes asking for something and I used to speak Spanish to them. In the cheaper/tastier restaurants it also helps to know your way around a Cuban menu, at least. Our next door neighbor was this hot gay Cuban guy and he became our best friend down there and he kept an eye on the place for us (we were the only ones who didn’t live in the building full-time.)
Oh, well, we’ll eventually be doing something different I guess. We’re thinking of joining the entire British and German civil services and retiring to Spain, there’s that Spanish again, but that will be a ways off.
The citizens of Wyoming do not mask up, either. I think the thing that most likely keeps Covid transmission at bay there is the fact that there are so few people in the state.
Honestly @memeweaver, the elevator situation alone at the resort was like well fuck this is a superspreader event. Places were so crowded. The only times we managed to not be around crowds were in restaurants since we tried for outside seating and went in off hours like close to 2pm for lunch, etc.
The population of Wyoming is about 580K
The population of my city, Oakland, CA is about 425K, the population of the SF Bay area is about 7 Million some.
Fuck Wyoming. And the Dakotas, and Montana, and Idaho…
travel observations…..
well okay
having an accent will get you laid in america
(also that whole renting a motel room to go get drunk and have sex with everyone is true!)
fuck me…..i thought it was a myth….i mean…how could a nation so prudish be so fuckish.
sides from that.. i recomend greece…the food is awesome..and they have chicken naggets
which i unfortunatly cannot provide a pic of right now….coz uploading into a comment is a bitch and discouraged i think
We are still at Lake Tahoe, smoke started to clear up last night but now the mountains are gone again & may even have a new fire. Hard to paddle or do anything strenuous as your eyes & lungs burn. So mostly just hanging out, drinking & watching my daughters deal with the cousin dynamics. They are the youngest & older ones trying to make them DD’s with little success.
Been to Florida 3 times & that was more than enough. Two were for shuttle launches, that was fun but other than Ron Jon’s, I hated everything about the place.
I’ve spent a day in Tampa, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Cocoa Beach while waiting on a cruise to start and all of those were lovely. The panhandle region though… fuck it I’m done with it.
I was at a lake “up north” in Ontario a couple weeks ago and the view was identical to the views in the middle of BC (before the fires). I’ll be back there in another couple of weeks and take pics to share.
“Make America Florida”? How the fuck could the current state of America be any less Floridian? Or worse, how could it possibly be more Floridian?
Per the googles, it looks like “Make America Florida” is also the name of a recently created PAC. So probably yet more grifting by Trump & co.
Aside from small children going to Disney World, I cannot fathom why the hell anyone would want to visit Florida. Talk about a shithole.
I haven’t traveled in…um…well…I don’t really remember. I think maybe it was Thanksgiving in WI in 2018? Or, maybe we went to VT in 2019, but I’m not sure. I’m hoping we can take a road trip to OH in October or November to visit some of my oldest friends, but so far Mrs. Butcher isn’t sounding particular enthused.
Oh man, I’m hoping you get to Ohio this fall to see your friends!
Also want to add I saw a ridiculous amount of sunburned children and that makes me so angry. Use sunscreen, take them to shade for chunks of time, and just buy the damn spf shirts to cover their little upper bodies.
I guess it’s probably due to being in places with lots of European tourists, but the spf shirts, especially for kids, were super common on the cruise stops and practically non-existent in the Florida panhandle.
Also also saw lots of babies too young to be in super hot sunny weather. Like if your infant can’t support its own neck yet, your sweaty ass should not be sitting on the beach with the bebe.
Sunscreen on children? There should be a law banning that tyranny! #freedom
We also need to ban Halloween. Children cannot breathe through masks!
The last time I was in Florida I was walking on the beach in Jacksonville and found a spent 9mm slug. But the zoo was pretty cool.
I’m glad you’re safe. I’m holding off any trips to Etats D’Unis for a while. Not even considering Florida at all. I’ll miss the seafood and divey oyster bars, but not much else.
Ne t’inquiète pas, mon ami! You opened the borders to fully vaccinated Americans so we’re all coming to you!
Last time I was in Florida was 2001. That’s close enough.