Vacation
It's snowing like a summbitch out there. So I'm consoling myself in fantasies of the vacation we're going to take in two weeks. Exactly two weeks from today I'll be among palm trees and balmy breezes, perhaps eating ribs or seafood after a day snorkeling on a reef. We're going to spend time in two places I love: Georgia and the Florida Keys.
We'll drive down the Appalachians, spend a night in Knoxville, then see Rock City and Chickamauga, and stay the next night high atop Atlanta in the Westin Peachtree (last time, our room was on the 89th floor). Then poke around Macon and Milledgeville (I want to see Flannery O'Conner's home), and head on down to Florida.
In the Keys, we'll kick back. When I say "the Keys," I don't mean Key West. Don't get me wrong, I love Key West, and we'll probably spend a day there, especially at Mel Fisher's Treasure Museum. But if you've only been to Key West, and you think you've seen the Keys, well, that's like going to Las Vegas and thinking you've seen "the West," or going only to Boston and believing you've been in "New England."
I like the Middle Keys, the redneck Keys. Still loose and edgy, for an American district, but grounded, local, full of character and characters. Jimmy Buffett's bar may be in Key West, but I doubt that's where he hangs it. I hate to publicize the places I like best, because they thrive on being basically undiscovered by the kind of people who kill local culture by enjoying it to death. (That's a sucky attitude, I know, but I live among the Amish, so forgive me.) But I will show you one of them, the Hungry Tarpon.
That's Luke posing outside the place when we went down in the summer of 2002. This is one of the cheap, good, totally local places, and it was my favorite spot to eat in the Keys, though we never made it to their famed "grits 'n' grunts" seafood breakfast for early-rising fishermen. The Hungry Tarpon (official address "somewhere on A1A;" the only hint I'll give you is that it's basically under a bridge abutment) is an old-time diner shack, with a few tables but mostly counter seating. It has year-round Christmas lights, and the grill is right across the counter, so you watch your food cooking. The bulk of the space above it is taken up by aluminum ventilation shafts. They're plastered over with bumper stickers. "Women: Can't Live Without 'em, Can't Shoot 'em," "Husbands Are Proof That Women Can Take a Joke," "Don't Steal, the Government Hates Competition," You Gotta Be Tough if You're Gonna Be Stupid." People who work as waitresses or cooks in other places in town come in to eat. That's a good sign.
You can't get a bad seafood meal in the Keys. Go into a clapboard crab shack and order a plastic basket full of fish fingers, and you find they're made from sushi-grade yellowtail.
We'll come home via Savannah and spend a day there. It's been half ruined by that friggin' book, but I hope the tourist excesses will have died down since we were last there, two years ago.
I had to fill out a school form to take Luke out of eighth grade for a couple of weeks, and I had to show how this trip was for educational purposes. Really, that's not difficult if you've got a flair for creativity. For instance, if we were going to Disney World, which none of us has had any desire to do, I could write, "visiting central Florida to study rodent habitats."
But even when it's legitimately educational (as this will be, in places), the nature of learning is slippery. Last time we went south, we climbed Kennesaw Mountain to learn about the Civil War battle. And we did learn about it, but on the paths up, Luke saw and captured kinds of skinks and lizards we'd never seen before and his most vivid memories of the battlefield are zoological, not historical.
We'll drive down the Appalachians, spend a night in Knoxville, then see Rock City and Chickamauga, and stay the next night high atop Atlanta in the Westin Peachtree (last time, our room was on the 89th floor). Then poke around Macon and Milledgeville (I want to see Flannery O'Conner's home), and head on down to Florida.
In the Keys, we'll kick back. When I say "the Keys," I don't mean Key West. Don't get me wrong, I love Key West, and we'll probably spend a day there, especially at Mel Fisher's Treasure Museum. But if you've only been to Key West, and you think you've seen the Keys, well, that's like going to Las Vegas and thinking you've seen "the West," or going only to Boston and believing you've been in "New England."
I like the Middle Keys, the redneck Keys. Still loose and edgy, for an American district, but grounded, local, full of character and characters. Jimmy Buffett's bar may be in Key West, but I doubt that's where he hangs it. I hate to publicize the places I like best, because they thrive on being basically undiscovered by the kind of people who kill local culture by enjoying it to death. (That's a sucky attitude, I know, but I live among the Amish, so forgive me.) But I will show you one of them, the Hungry Tarpon.
That's Luke posing outside the place when we went down in the summer of 2002. This is one of the cheap, good, totally local places, and it was my favorite spot to eat in the Keys, though we never made it to their famed "grits 'n' grunts" seafood breakfast for early-rising fishermen. The Hungry Tarpon (official address "somewhere on A1A;" the only hint I'll give you is that it's basically under a bridge abutment) is an old-time diner shack, with a few tables but mostly counter seating. It has year-round Christmas lights, and the grill is right across the counter, so you watch your food cooking. The bulk of the space above it is taken up by aluminum ventilation shafts. They're plastered over with bumper stickers. "Women: Can't Live Without 'em, Can't Shoot 'em," "Husbands Are Proof That Women Can Take a Joke," "Don't Steal, the Government Hates Competition," You Gotta Be Tough if You're Gonna Be Stupid." People who work as waitresses or cooks in other places in town come in to eat. That's a good sign.
You can't get a bad seafood meal in the Keys. Go into a clapboard crab shack and order a plastic basket full of fish fingers, and you find they're made from sushi-grade yellowtail.
We'll come home via Savannah and spend a day there. It's been half ruined by that friggin' book, but I hope the tourist excesses will have died down since we were last there, two years ago.
I had to fill out a school form to take Luke out of eighth grade for a couple of weeks, and I had to show how this trip was for educational purposes. Really, that's not difficult if you've got a flair for creativity. For instance, if we were going to Disney World, which none of us has had any desire to do, I could write, "visiting central Florida to study rodent habitats."
But even when it's legitimately educational (as this will be, in places), the nature of learning is slippery. Last time we went south, we climbed Kennesaw Mountain to learn about the Civil War battle. And we did learn about it, but on the paths up, Luke saw and captured kinds of skinks and lizards we'd never seen before and his most vivid memories of the battlefield are zoological, not historical.
