Highway 27 is my preferred route across Florida, with a speed limit in rural areas around 70 mph (112km/h) you make miles through the orange groves and past small towns. Plus you get to see Florida the way it sort of was before the Turnpike and the Interstates. And as we have seen in the Grand Florida tour of 2009, bits of central Florida are hilly, almost nosebleed hilly, like this:
One of my favorite photographer is a Californian who settled in Florida and took to photographing the wildlife in the state, particularly well known for his massive black and white portraits of the Everglades. If you have ten grand to spare you can cover a wall with one of Clyde Butcher's magnificent pictures. He coined the phrase "Florida mountains"to describe the huge puffy summer clouds that build up over the state in the heat of summer:
Highway 27 takes a turn to the East around the southern shores of Lake Okeechobee, which is the largest body of fresh water in the continental United states second only to lake Superior, and is thoroughly uninteresting despite that. I have sailed across the lake from Clewiston to eastern lock and it has nothing to show all the way across. However on the southern shore nestles the city made possible by Big Sugar, the US Sugar Corporation, formerly known as Southern Sugar. Eleven billion of your tax dollars go to the sugar industry so every time you eat a candy bar you are swallowing five cents of your own tax dollars. Weird huh? Big Sugar has supposedly made a deal with the state to sell their lands and turn them back to wilderness to clean up the flow of water into the Everglades and restore the waters to the south of the state. Meanwhile Clewiston remains an agricultural town with a large population of Latin fieldworkers and a monument to the good old days of Big Sugar, the corporation's hotel, called the Clewiston Inn: 
It sits alongside Highway 27 where the road enters the town from the west, and from the front, despite the garish BBQ sign, it looks the part of the fine southern mansion. The rear of the hotel has a second, less well known entrance and being as how I am a Floridian my idea of a good parking spot is somewhere in the shade. So I parked the Maxima under the Royal Palms and in we went through the unobtrusive back door.
The interior of the hotel is everything you would imagine a 1938 building should be, all wood paneling and chandeliers:
This being the 21st century the idiot box had to be turned on in a corner, sucking every ounce of intelligent thought out of the room, so we went on to the lunch we had been looking forward to since -ahem!- breakfast in Lake Wales.
Aside from the propaganda machine the room looks much as it always has done:
This incarnation of the hotel replaced the original 1926 building which burned down. Nowadays with fire codes and government supervision we tend to forget how prevalent fires were in the days of candles, kerosene and uncertain wiring:
As hard to imagine as it may be, the Clewiston Inn was a fashionable place to gather, play tennis and wile away a long cold winter, like these fashionable folk, captured by Mr Kodak's invention in the prime of their young lives:
The corridors of the hotel are lined with pictures from the Inn's past and I wanted to photograph them all...instead I took a picture of the enormous menu in an effort to remember what was offered:
The dining room itself was quite delightful in the same vein as the rest of the hotel, just as we remembered it from previous visits. The room absorbed the conversations from the neighboring tables and as we waited for our food I found myself pondering a surprising thought. Considering the tables next to us were occupied by a trio of Latino businessmen, a group of African-Americans, my wife who is a Jew and me who is an immigrant, I figured none of us would have been allowed to eat in the Colonial Dining room when it was re-built in 1938. Thanks to the Federal Government's enforcement of President Johnson's Great Society legislation we were all there enjoying our meals without a second thought. And very good the food was too.
I mean, who among us doesn't like fried okra, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, sweet potato casserole, meatloaf or fried chicken? Throw in a couple of sodas, tax and tip and you are stuffed for thirty dollars. 
We waddled back out into the sunshine to admire the clouds and the matching paintwork on the hotel. We failed to spot the "friendly female ghost" said to haunt the Inn, not surprisingly as she, like most apparitions of popular myth seem to prefer the hours of darkness. Anyway spirits are allergic to my robust sense of mistrust and you can be sure if I am around they won't appear.
There are advantages to touring in a car; two that I can think of: One being air conditioning, another the ability to take more or less gruesome pictures from behind the wheel of the car, of passing monuments like this plough. A hearty reminder of the richness of the soil that used to be Everglades marshland before the US Army Corps of Engineers efficiently organized it's transformation into cropland. We have since discovered that the drive by private industry to commercialize the Everglades is a Bad Thing and now the Corps is patiently trying to supervise it's return to it's original format:
And for a technophobe like me there is the advantage that you can talk to your passenger without the use of electrons. which is useful when home is six hours away across more flatlands and rather uninteresting urban messes like the rest of Clewiston:
And these rural clapboard houses that put me in mind of small homes on the prairie:
I have no idea what this was named after:
And back, on the road again...Highway 27 toward Homestead:
Toward the islands we call home, the only place worth living in Florida.
One of my favorite photographer is a Californian who settled in Florida and took to photographing the wildlife in the state, particularly well known for his massive black and white portraits of the Everglades. If you have ten grand to spare you can cover a wall with one of Clyde Butcher's magnificent pictures. He coined the phrase "Florida mountains"to describe the huge puffy summer clouds that build up over the state in the heat of summer:Highway 27 takes a turn to the East around the southern shores of Lake Okeechobee, which is the largest body of fresh water in the continental United states second only to lake Superior, and is thoroughly uninteresting despite that. I have sailed across the lake from Clewiston to eastern lock and it has nothing to show all the way across. However on the southern shore nestles the city made possible by Big Sugar, the US Sugar Corporation, formerly known as Southern Sugar. Eleven billion of your tax dollars go to the sugar industry so every time you eat a candy bar you are swallowing five cents of your own tax dollars. Weird huh? Big Sugar has supposedly made a deal with the state to sell their lands and turn them back to wilderness to clean up the flow of water into the Everglades and restore the waters to the south of the state. Meanwhile Clewiston remains an agricultural town with a large population of Latin fieldworkers and a monument to the good old days of Big Sugar, the corporation's hotel, called the Clewiston Inn: It sits alongside Highway 27 where the road enters the town from the west, and from the front, despite the garish BBQ sign, it looks the part of the fine southern mansion. The rear of the hotel has a second, less well known entrance and being as how I am a Floridian my idea of a good parking spot is somewhere in the shade. So I parked the Maxima under the Royal Palms and in we went through the unobtrusive back door.The interior of the hotel is everything you would imagine a 1938 building should be, all wood paneling and chandeliers:This being the 21st century the idiot box had to be turned on in a corner, sucking every ounce of intelligent thought out of the room, so we went on to the lunch we had been looking forward to since -ahem!- breakfast in Lake Wales.Aside from the propaganda machine the room looks much as it always has done:
This incarnation of the hotel replaced the original 1926 building which burned down. Nowadays with fire codes and government supervision we tend to forget how prevalent fires were in the days of candles, kerosene and uncertain wiring:As hard to imagine as it may be, the Clewiston Inn was a fashionable place to gather, play tennis and wile away a long cold winter, like these fashionable folk, captured by Mr Kodak's invention in the prime of their young lives:The corridors of the hotel are lined with pictures from the Inn's past and I wanted to photograph them all...instead I took a picture of the enormous menu in an effort to remember what was offered:The dining room itself was quite delightful in the same vein as the rest of the hotel, just as we remembered it from previous visits. The room absorbed the conversations from the neighboring tables and as we waited for our food I found myself pondering a surprising thought. Considering the tables next to us were occupied by a trio of Latino businessmen, a group of African-Americans, my wife who is a Jew and me who is an immigrant, I figured none of us would have been allowed to eat in the Colonial Dining room when it was re-built in 1938. Thanks to the Federal Government's enforcement of President Johnson's Great Society legislation we were all there enjoying our meals without a second thought. And very good the food was too.
I mean, who among us doesn't like fried okra, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, sweet potato casserole, meatloaf or fried chicken? Throw in a couple of sodas, tax and tip and you are stuffed for thirty dollars. 
We waddled back out into the sunshine to admire the clouds and the matching paintwork on the hotel. We failed to spot the "friendly female ghost" said to haunt the Inn, not surprisingly as she, like most apparitions of popular myth seem to prefer the hours of darkness. Anyway spirits are allergic to my robust sense of mistrust and you can be sure if I am around they won't appear.
There are advantages to touring in a car; two that I can think of: One being air conditioning, another the ability to take more or less gruesome pictures from behind the wheel of the car, of passing monuments like this plough. A hearty reminder of the richness of the soil that used to be Everglades marshland before the US Army Corps of Engineers efficiently organized it's transformation into cropland. We have since discovered that the drive by private industry to commercialize the Everglades is a Bad Thing and now the Corps is patiently trying to supervise it's return to it's original format:And for a technophobe like me there is the advantage that you can talk to your passenger without the use of electrons. which is useful when home is six hours away across more flatlands and rather uninteresting urban messes like the rest of Clewiston:And these rural clapboard houses that put me in mind of small homes on the prairie:I have no idea what this was named after:And back, on the road again...Highway 27 toward Homestead:Toward the islands we call home, the only place worth living in Florida.
It seems to me that squirrels probably get lots of human attention in the parking lot at Bok Tower because this little guy ran up to us and literally held out his paws in supplication. We were stone hearted not least because we had nothing to offer and besides I like it that the Keys are squirrel free, so I don't want to encourage any member of the genus to imagine that life in the Keys is the least bit attractive for squirrels. Iguanas are pests enough for the islands. 
Bok Tower is set in a garden dreamed up by a dude called Edward....wait for it...Bok! Who, just like me emigrated to the US from Europe, Holland in his case, when he was a toddler around 1870. He made a name for himself publishing, of all things, The Ladies' Home Journal a job that suited him so well that he got prizes and recognition for it. He also had the great good sense to marry an extremely wealthy woman so that when he fell in love with a sandy knob of land near Lake Wales, Florida, he had the wherewithal to buy it and turn it into his dream garden. Hence the whole Bok attraction.
Edward Bok's grandmother handed down a saying that is all over this national Historic Landmark -Make you the world a bit better or more beautiful because you have lived in it- and I suppose one has to attribute the tortured syntax to the fact that she was Dutch or possibly that was the way they spake back then. Of course, a man of my skeptical mien likes to think a pocket full of cash is a good way to start if you plan to make the world beautiful. Bok certainly did that with his wife's cash so I'm guessing his grandma would have been happy. We were with our solitude.
We arrived right at opening time and we had Bok Gardens to ourselves at 8:30 in the morning which was perfect. We picked a spot in the vast spacious empty parking lot, ducked the importuning of the squirrels and legged it through the delightful courtyards of the visitor center. This is something how I would like my dream house to look with capable gardeners to keep the vegetation alive for me as I stroll my shady cloisters.
With the sun relatively low in the sky we started walking and the more we walked the better it got. Bok Gardens was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted who turned the sandy hillock into something quite splendid with all sorts of flowering stuff that I couldn't possibly identify:
As far as I can tell Bok Tower Gardens is a private foundation but works with the Ag Extension or some other state agency to preserve and propagate endangered species. I checked their website (do I have to tell you to Google Bok Tower?) but they are rather vague on the subject. We walked among areas devoted to the maintenance of native species that are apparently running out of room in the state at large. They also offer opportunities to sit and do nothing much which makes a change from Florida at large as well: 
Walking the gardens was a bit of a mind bender as one expected it to be a fresh cool autumnal morning under the oak trees instead it was a blisteringly hot and humid August morning in Central Florida. The silence was delightful.
As we sauntered along with the tower as our goal I must confess I really did expect that we would be allowed to get inside the tower and climb the stairs to the top. It seemed quite the undertaking I grant you, as it is 200 feet (65 meters) tall, but I was looking forward to the climb and the view. 
The tower is guarded by a moat, as all good fairy tales advise us, and in the moat there were swans doing what swans do best which is preening. The feathers lying in the grass are evidence of a pretty heavy outbreak of preening and general beautifying right before we got there.
Like the resident squirrel population I'm guessing that the swans are quite used to people because these two just stared at us, happily without feeling the need to beg. I got a sudden attack of Richard Attenborough-itis when I saw this gecko doing it's best to attract my attention with it's overt display of a large orange goiter:
Calvin Coolidge dedicated the gardens and Bok is buried underneath the tower in the manner that rich people seemed to enjoy at that time. The Lick Observatory above San Jose, California has it's main telescope planted on top of the mouldering remains of it's creator as well.
Shortly thereafter all hell broke lose and the Stock Market crashed, and stabilized and crashed again, rather in the manner we see today. The Tower and Gardens are riding it all out all over again. However to climb up the tower takes rather more than just showing up.
I spoke to a gardener who was pottering around at the base of the tower and he said he had been up twice and onto the roof itself, which he described as the place where the usual air conditioning equipment and stuff hangs out. But he noted the views are tremendous and one can see either coast on a clear day. All of which made me salivate even more to get to the top. I wondered if he might have been susceptible to a bribe but he seemed young and wholesome and the thought of corrupting a fresh faced youth didn't seem worth it. Even from the base of the tower the views were quite refreshing. At 300 feet (100 meters) this hill would hardly rate a mention in most States in the Union, but in Florida this is the highest point in the peninsula and by the time global warming has it's way in 2100, this place will be a small island.
And there is President Coolidge looking down on the left with Edward Bok all silver haired staring straight ahead, that fateful day in February 1929 when they opened the place:
None of which I really grasped but it was quite unusual all the way round. The bells were cast in England and apparently the original foundry in Loughborough is still in business and stands ready and able to supply parts and replacements as needed. I wonder if in a century Triumph will do the same to whoever gets to inherit my Bonneville. And in inimitable style the Bok Tower people illustrated the size of the largest bell thusly:
Big enough no doubt to justify the appellation "The Singing Tower." This is but a very superficial tour of Bok Tower Gardens, there is a stately home on the premises open for tours and much more to the grounds than I have been able to show. I have no idea why I never came here before even when I was frequently crossing the state on nearby Highway 60. Better late than never, as the cliché has it.