Seagrapes In Summer

I read that a heat dome is descending over the middle of this country and many more people across the US will soon be enjoying temperatures well over 100 degrees. There is deep within me a rather unpleasant feeling that a misery shared is a misery halved. Long time readers of this excessively verbose page know that I go on at length about how I like summers in Florida with fewer people, more dramatic skies and waves of warmth.

Yes, well I have come to the conclusion that too much of a good thing is not so terribly great. I walked out of the house at four thirty in the morning to take Rusty to check the mail and was greeted by a wave of heat in the face, a damp blanket of warmth that had me breaking out in sweat before we had even started our walk. Rusty's mail checks consist of wandering around the streets near our house where the trailer park neighbors walk their dogs twice a day in unvarying patterns and leave scents for Rusty to pick up. For some people this heat is life threatening, for others it is one more economic burden in what is already a tough year. For me it is merely a  nuisance and I feel lucky. Over heated but lucky.

I try to walk Rusty at dusk or nearly in an effort to catch a break but my photographic exercises are rather limited if the sun has gone down enough to lower temperatures slightly so I have resorted to contemplating the seagrape which grows in abundance alongside the roads close to my camera and far from the muddy puddles that fill the backwood trails at the moment.

I used to live with seagrapes when we had a house on Ramrod Key but I grew weary of them. These vast green dinner plates which have the toughness and consistency of the hide of a large predatory animal turn red yellow and brown and fall to the grown in endless snowdrifts of leathery dead leaves. They are the devil to rake, impossible to sweep and fill garbage cans easily and completely on those  days for garden debris pick up. I got sick of chasing after the seagrape bushes shedding leaves faster than I could scrape them up.

Nowadays I have no seagrapes to call my own and they have  been restored in my fickle mind to their preeminent place as interesting plants.  The thing is you can eat them too and in my yard I was lucky to get a few purple grapes every year as most were gobbled up by the wildlife. They are that delicious. Well let's not exaggerate: they taste good once ripe. The fruit has a huge pip inside the  grape-like flesh so part of the pleasure of eating them is rolling the seagrape through your teeth stripping the stone of the clingy flesh. They taste a bit like regular grapes. Eating seagrapes is a mild pleasure so if you think you are missing out on some wild Florida hallucinatory experience rest assured you are better off buying cotton candy flavored grapes at the supermarket. I nearly choked when a colleague offered me a grape without telling me of the enhanced qualities of the fruit. I like my flavors traditional.

Actually there is a fruit called miracle berry and I've had that and what a wild ride that was. The cotton candy colleague brought some little red berries to work along with some fruit and we spent a little time amusing ourselves eating lemons like they were candy. It takes an act of faith to take a huge bite out of a lemon after you've chewed the little red Miracle Berry but what a mind bender it is to taste the sugar and none of the sour. I mention that by way of a diversion from seagrapes.

Seagrapes are so textured and come in such a broad array of colors I like trying to isolate the colors and shapes in their endless variety.

Happily for me but not for the roadside bushes Monroe County sent a crew to trim the shrubbery recently when I wasn't there so it came as a surprise to see lots of brown leaves. The result is a Fall spectacular of dead leaves shining in the evening sun.

I am terrible at cutting and pruning and prefer my plants to grow in abundance and confusion but hurricane season requires preparation and clearing of roadside obstructions and protection of overhead wires. besides no one wants an untidy roadway do they? I do but I count myself a minority of one.

Shreds of flame and color everywhere if you look.

One last seagrape...

One last glimpse of clouds pressing down and then its back to suburbia and civilization and comfort. 

Oh well.

Robert Is Here

The original fruit stand was built in 1959 and here it still is, open and selling coronavirus notwithstanding.

However the fruit stand’s owner Robert,  isn't playing games and the service which is usually a wandering around gawping at weird fruit experience is now a drive through order by name experience. And very glad we were for it too.

I imagine this place was bursting July 4th but a few days later it was a straight drive through for our van. 

There were three drive up positions with a menu but I already knew I wanted  a strawberry shake while my wife went exotic with passionfruit, a peculiarly inaptly named thing which is more tart than sweet in my opinion. 

Robert is Here in the linked magazine article is described as located in "Florida's forgotten farmlands" which orotund oratory as usual is a little light on the facts. The fruit stand sits astride the road to Everglades National Park, a road that is rather poorly marked oddly enough. You'd think Homestead would make a fuss about being the gateway to one of the oddest and least understood park in the system  (my opinion) but electronic mapping will get you to this iconic fruit stand. 

My wife pondered her tropical choices for a bang up fruit salad while I looked around. Normally she would be working over the staff at the tables while I would wander outside with Rusty but coronavirus has changed everything of course. We were happy the store was taking its precautions so seriously as that gave us the opportunity to stop by. It makes travel just a bit more enjoyable tasting the local stuff. Gratuitous Rusty picture:

The process took our ten foot tall van on a path winding through the business, tortoises to the left of us and fruit to the right of us, as they have an exotic animal rescue area in the back. 

Gloves masks and fruit. Excellent service. I heard on the cashier’s two way radio that Robert was packing our order. The Robert? I asked. She nodded. Ok then...

The stuff you like to wander around and look at as part of the Robert experience is off limits for now. Bummer.

The main attraction is what counts. A rare treat and perfectly delicious as you might imagine.

So then if you have a van with some Kermit chairs you can social distance on a  levee of your choice and watch the world go by. People miss a lot of Florida by racing to Duval Street.

Rusty the explorer:

All enhanced by Robert and his Fruit.

Lunch In Sebring

Sebring for lunch, some pictures on a blazing hot July 4th outside the van, while Rusty and I walked.

On my road trips I enjoy the small Florida towns and I miss being able to stop off and walk at will.

We found ourselves surrounded by people not wearing masks which limited our ability to wander and look.

Lots of empty spaces but she stopped right here and walked away to a crowd leaving lots of empty spaces fifteen feet from her badly parked car left with it's diaper trailing.

I took a few photos of things that caught my eye as we walked. Not Key West this week...

The blue dot marks the spot.

And afterwards north on Highway 17  lined by orange groves.

And characteristic dips in the road. 

Social Distancing On The Road

From the Ocala National Forest we took two days to get home making a  total of three nights on the road. Our idea was to see how we coped with various sleeping situations which are so different from what we knew on our sailboat. So after our wet experiences in the forest we got on the road and lumbered down sand roads to the pavement at sedate less than 30 miles per hour.  

The van cruises  at 70 mph on cruise control but fuel consumption dips to 15 mpg. I found that holding 60 mph I could see computer numbers (accuracy undetermined) hovering between 18 and 20 mpg. We had nowhere to be in a  hurry. Driving is easy enough but you need to anticipate your braking with a ten thousand pound van and equally after you have stopped for a traffic light you need to wait a while to wind up the acceleration again.   It will take off like an overloaded scalded cat but the point here is longevity not speed so babying the transmission seems the most sensible course of action. Stability control keeps the box upright and my wife loves the cubbyholes and storage pockets throughout the cab.

My wife had a plan to stop at Camping World in Ocala to check out Stuff, something we can't do in South Florida where Camping World has yet to establish a beachhead. However while we sat in the parking lot and I sweated to replace the electrical plug I broke driving off last week, my wife looked for masks going into the store and saw none. We decided to keep moving but as evidenced by the stuff for sale, we were back in civilization.

Rusty resigned his post as Chief Security Officer for a while choosing to plug in and drop out to recharge his batteries.

One has to resign oneself to the less than attractive spots and we took lunch followed by a copious nap in a rest area. Grilled cheese and tomato soup can apparently bring on the exhaustion of a fully lived life and the three of us passed out as comfortable as you please under the air conditioning in the middle of the parking lot. Rather weird but the price was right. 

In a time of coronavirus when you live with concerns about getting the disease this has to be the best way to get around and sales of RVs and campers are soaring for the time being. But I cannot see many of those purchases leading to a desire to spend days or weeks or -God forbid!- months in a small space such as we enjoyed. Sure, we had our doubts and discussed them but we went through all that doubt when first living on  a  boat and we knew what to expect this time. The space itself is much smaller than a 34 foot catamaran but the outside world is vast and easy to access, no dinghy required. I think for us to enjoy the interior space we need to have untrammeled exterior space.

For us there is not much value in paying to sleep in crowded campgrounds cheek-by-jowl with other refugees from reality. We both got the idea that for us travel without reservations, without fixed destinations, with pauses here and there to eat and sleep and hopefully one day to actually dine out like our civilized past, is how we want to travel. Van life stuck in one spot would be dreary, an invitation to rent a home temporarily, something we plan to do on the road. Equally for us if we have a small nimble home driving around pretending its a forty foot apartment that needs to be plugged in every night would be absurd. I see a way forward that we might very well enjoy but I readily accept that in an increasingly regimented world run on satellite time we may be veering off into the unpredictable world of nonconformity. With three weeks vacation starting next week these vague ideas will start to be put to the test.