Florida: Not Just for Teeny-boppers and Wrinklies

I've always been a person who despised Florida. I thought it was for the most boring retirees on the planet (i.e., people who might as well die because all they do is play golf and complain about kids and neighbors), plus all the people in college I really hated (the perfect girls with perfect tans and the guy jocks). A visit to Orlando two years ago did nothing to change this. Florida was stifling, both in terms of weather and intellectual stimulation.

To be fair, I'm not a sun-lover. I burn. I don't like to be hot. On a hot day, if there's no shade, I scurry around like a pathetic bug, trying to find shade. Around 70 degrees is my perfect weather, plus I like a fair share of rainy days and love winter. So Florida and I don't mix well.

But I've just softened my opinions on the place. Last weekend hubby and I took a nearly spontaneous trip to Fort Lauderdale. JetBlue was offering crazy cheap flights from our local airport, so we took them. Not realizing that it was Super Bowl weekend (I don't like football, either, and hubby is a foreigner who thinks football is for wimps and prefers rugby), we got stuck driving to a hotel about 60 miles from Fort Lauderdale and Miami, heart of sugar-growing country.

I have to say we were both pretty fascinated. This land is flat, flat, flat--a "sea of grass," as one writer put it. On the map, roads skirt regions that don't say "here there be dragons" in so many words, but they definitely leave that impression. Here there be alligators, definitely.

Twenty miles out of the seriously overpopulated Palm Beach/Fort Lauderdale/Miami region, you run into miles and miles of nothing. "So, anything to do around here?" we asked the girl at our hotel. "Nope," she said, in the manner of teenagers everywhere who grow up in rural regions. I sympathized--there had been nothing to do in my wheat-growing hometown, either.

But, being beyond teenage years, we were entertained: we chased a semi-truck full of oranges (wouldn't they have tasted good, fresh off the tree?), watched sugar cane being harvested, and stopped to watch a pond full of lazy-floating alligators, herons, and egrets.

This region is also one of the most environmentally devastated in the country. Once, these swampy miles fed the precarious ecosystem of the Everglades. Now, with waterways redirected and canals dug to feed the voracious water needs (and water greeds, like golf courses) of the wealthy South Florida population, the Everglades regions are almost destroyed.

Stopping at a rest area on "Alligator Alley," I played with an interactive display that showed just how much this area has changed since white man decided we could grow sugar and other groceries on it. For those who love the earth, and cherish wild places where birds can roost, it's devastating.

The government is embarking on a stupendous effort to redirect much of the water systems. Will it work? Who knows. But it will definitely be a fight between people who care for everything, and people who care for nothing outside their own overpriced walls.

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The second part of the trip was a friend's whirlwind tour of Miami and Miami Beach, which was a pleasant surprise. Miami Beach is a cool, fun area--lots of cafes, pedestrian walkways, and streets packed with preserved art deco architecture--not something you see everywhere. This is a place I wouldn't mind coming back to, which, being a traditional hater of Florida, rather surprised me.

In the end, there are many reasons to see Florida. And none of them have anything to do with baking on a hot beach.