Florida.

So I left in October with my friend Dominic and we drove straight to Florida without too much sidetracking. We went to Gainesville for a three day music festival. Its a pretty wild affair and attracts a fairly varied crowd. Its $55 for three days and it spread out into about eight different venues in town and you get a special wristband that will get you into all of them without any cover charge or anything. There’s a couple of great local places like Flaco’s and El Indio. Flaco’s is a little Cuban Sandwhich shop. They make the best cuban sandwhiches and guava cheese pastries! El Indio is a little mexican place and you can get tacos and burritos for about $2 each and they are really good. Everything is fairly close so we took two bikes to ride around on this enabled us to get around to each place really quickly and this gave us more time to see more bands. Either the first or second night we saw “This Bike is a Pipe Bomb” and my glasses got knocked off and fell on the floor. We looked for them after the show and couldn’t find them so I had to wear sun glasses the rest of the weekend. As it turns out this will get you a lot of confused stares. Gainesville is a neat town its old and dirty and everything has a lot of character.

Sunday night all the shows were over so we left town and drove east to Jacksonville. He had a flight the next day and I suggested we go to the beach for a bit that night. We ended up finding a park on the beach and walked out to the ocean. It was great with all the stars out and a nice sea breeze. We drove on to St. Augustine and I slept on a beach there and some jogger woke me up because the tide was creeping up on me. It turned out to be about a half of a foot beneath the bottom of my sleeping bag. We drove north to Jacksonville and I dropped him off at the airport.

After I dropped Dom off I drove back west on 40 to Ocala and then south on 19 to Clearwater. It was really beautiful on 40 it was really dense forest and rolling hills. I missed a turn and accidentally drove to the ocean on 40 and it was really pretty. It wasn’t developed or anything up there, just trees and sand with a smattering of tiny marsh homes. But I wanted to get to Tampa so I turned around and went south. I drove straight to Dunedin and slept behind a library. I spent the next couple of days wandering around Clearwater and trying to find housing and a job. I contacted a woman named Maria about a listing on Craigslist. It said something like “Free room and board in exchange for driving.” So I was all over it. Turns out it was about two hours from the ocean and that was the deal breaker. Otherwise it would have been great. I ended up getting kinda frustrated with the city and all the traffic and one night I drove east to Vero Beach. I stopped about twenty miles outside the city and unwittingly slept in front of an orange grove, where apparently, of all things people go hunting? I was told this by the Sheriff and his deputee when they woke me up at five in the morning knocking on the driver side window. I was in deep sleep in my underwear and not very cogent so they decided to leave me be.

I arrived in Vero Beach and started my usual search for a library and then subsequent search for a job and housing. I usually spent the mornings on this routine and then my nights exploring the area. I kept getting leads that would take me north and then south again and this was pretty exhausting. First I drove up to Melbourne and tried to get a job at a law firm servicing their computers. After the interview I went looking for a place to live and I found a cheap room south of town. I went to it and it was unreal. There was a riding lawnmower in the kitchen which was much too nice to have a mower in it. Granite counters and the like. Also the guy was stealing internet from his neighbors wireless router and supposedly his wife and kid had just left him and he was surviving on disabillity. The house was really messy. Papers all over and random furniture tipped over in places. It was a good deal but I didn’t really feel safe in the place so I left and told him I would call him later with my decision. I think that was a good idea. I didn’t end up getting the job despite my solid resume and stellar references. So I drove south again to Vero Beach. I found a yacht club there and asked around about learning how to sail. One guy there said that there were five like this one in Fort Pierce and to go there. So I drove there and started going to each yacht club. Unfortunately this didn’t really go anywhere. After a day or two in Port. Saint Lucie I drove south to Hollywood, FL. I kept falling back to familiar territory from my last trip. It didn’t feel the same though and this was an important reckoning. I finally got a lead on Craigslist about a guy named Captain Doug who taught sailing lessons out of his twenty-eight foot schooner. But he was up in Stuart where I had just come from. So I drove back north and started looking for a room to rent. I got a call back from a guy named Joe. He was from Massachusets and he sounded like it too. We talked for a bit on the phone and he offered to get me moved in that night. So I drove to his place and payed him for a week and moved in.

He was a really gracious host from the start. He kept telling me he was breaking all these rules he normally has for guests and I kept thanking him for it. We hit it off and talked for a while the first night. He was by my standards pretty unusual for an older guy. He stayed up late and drank martinis and wine and smoked fancy cigars. He did this every night after he got off work. I kinda wasted my first week there, didn’t get out much. At first I was just fatigued from living out of the truck, but then I came to realize I didn’t like doing things alone. Like going to the beach alone, it just plain sucked now. Joe invited me to have early thanksgiving with him and his friends and I accepted. It was a lot of fun. I went sailing earlier that same day. I met Captain Doug down in Stuart on the docks and we got out right away. It was a perfect day for sailing. It was sunny and pretty windy. But not too windy as to make it unmanageable. Sailing is a curious thing. I enjoy it for a number of reasons. One of which is the novelty of navigating and the other is more abstract. I felt as though I was connecting with an old way of life. Something that has existed for millenia but relatively unchanged. A tradition of sorts I guess. I hope to one day sail around the Caribbean.

The second week I started studying for my SCUBA test. In the middle of the week Joe’s brother mysteriously fell into a coma and eventually passed after a few dreadful days. Joe left for New York to see his family for thanksgiving and now had this to deal with. I felt bad for him and his family. I’m not good at consoling people so I always feel awkward in these types of situations. I started my dive lessons at the Jupiter Dive Center in Jupiter. I picked them because they allow you to make your own schedule and I was looking to fast track my certification. I was getting pretty homesick by now. My instructor Hamilton Mason was awesome. He was an older guy and had two sons. One of which works at the mountaineering outfit about two blocks from my house in Boulder! Small world indeed! He had a straightforward approach to the lessons and emphasized the important aspects with proper intensity. He also seemed to appreciate my aptitude. I ended up getting 100% on the test. We went to the first dive that same day. The first dive is the dullest. Its a confined water dive in a swimming pool. It was still fun though. I executed nearly every task flawlessly.

The second dive was much better. We met at Phil Foster State Park at 7am, suited up and waded in. We were under for eighty five minutes. We swam under a bridge and around a concrete pier and there was a good amount of wild life and a few derelicts (sunken yachts).

The third and fourth dives were the best by far. We met at the dive shop which backs up to a channel that leads out to the ocean. We boarded the boat and headed out about three miles and then we began deploying. It was amazing. Such a calm and secure feeling in the middle of the ocean. We immediately began our decent to sixty feet which is the limit for non certified divers. I swam down further but Ham pulled me back up and scolded me. We were drift diving along the continental shelf so we were being carried along by the current. It was wonderful. The shelf was analogous to a desert cliff if it had been under sixty feet of water. There is a massive amount of wildlife under the sea and its all present. It’s very scenic. We began our ascent for our surface interval. We then began our fourth and final dive on Nitrox. Nitrox is a mixture of Nitrogen and Oxygen but with a higher percentage of oxygen than you would normally breathe. This allows for extended dive times, unless you breathe through all your air too quickly. Nitrox is also a separate certification from Open Water. This time I saw and swam within about three feet of a six foot long Nurse Shark. This was the best dive of all because there was a wonderful amount of diverse wildlife. Many schools of fish and many underwater plants. We were supposed to be under for nearly fifty minutes but the other guy in our group breathed his tank too quickly again. He was pretty embarassed so no one gave him a hard time about it. According to Ham, women are the best divers and partners because they breathe very slowly. This seemed to hold true every time. I’m okay at slow breathing, but I have a lot of room for improvement.

Resurfacing is a really strange experience because your leaving a completely different environment and entering another in the space of about ten minutes. When your under its really peaceful and quiet save for the sounds of your own breathing. When I got to about thirty feet I could vaguely see the sky through the waves at the surface. We got back on the boat and celebrated our classes achievement with oatmeal cookies.

Having completed my certification I decided to head home to Colorado. I went back to the room and began packing and doing laundry. I called Joe said goodbye and started driving. I drove all the way to the panhandle and found a nice rest stop about a mile from the interstate and slept there over night. I spent the next few days driving not stopping much on the way. I did make a stop in Alabama to see the U.S.S. Alabama outside of Mobile. I drove straight to New Orleans and went to the French Quarter. I got dinner at Coop’s Place and walked around for a bit. Coop’s had the best Jambalaya I’ve ever tasted. I want to go back sometime to see the city in the Spring when it’s supposed to be busy. I just drove and drove all the way back home through Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas finally New Mexico and then Colorado.

Here are all of my photos from Florida.