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author | luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net> | 2023-04-28 15:28:39 -0500 |
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committer | luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net> | 2023-04-28 15:28:39 -0500 |
commit | 26d2cd06a5cab286dd7cd6805baedf28538f4df3 (patch) | |
tree | 6691696292bade690e6f13762bb79fc0e1f6c441 /scratch.txt | |
parent | 5a60ce03e5a420a2d2f94743c511bb39eeb2455a (diff) |
jrnl: started st george post
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-rw-r--r-- | scratch.txt | 24 |
1 files changed, 24 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index f952559..127737a 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -205,6 +205,30 @@ People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun. Every little withdrawl you can make, not only resists the system, but empowers you. Yes even tiny acts like paying cash to a person rather than swiping your implant at the self checkout screen. + +## St George + +Driving west on Florida's highway 98 is a little like traveling back in time. It's hard to believe standing on a crowded beach in Panama City, but not ten miles east, once you pass through tk, the actual city of Panama City, the crowds disappear. Along with everything else. After winding through some rundown warehouse districts at the very eastern edge of the city the highway passes over tk bay and onto the property of tk Air Force Base. + +The base is a kind of barrier that stops Panama City from advancing eastward. After you clear the base you're in Mexico Beach, which is in the process of expanding for some reason. It's the least appealing part of this area. Perhaps it's cheap. It's once you clear Mexico Beach that you begin to slip back in time a little. This is a place we've been coming since 2009. + +The region from roughly Port St Joe in the west, to Alligator Point in the east, is known as the lost coast. That's mostly marketing, but it has an element of truth to it. Far fewer people come out here. It's too far from any airports and it lacks any resorts to really draw in the tourists. + +Having been coming here for so long, I've written about this area quite a few times. In [All The Pretty Beaches](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2013/05/all-the-pretty-beaches) I call it "a little backwater in time", a slice of the world as it used to be before the proliferation of mega-resorts and all-inclusive vacation package extravaganzas. I'm happy to report that the island itself still very much has that feel. + +There's still little more to St. George than a store, a gas station and a couple of seafood trailers offering up fresh shrimp, snapper and scallops from nearby Apalachicola. There are plenty of AirBnBs and condos, but the two motels are still rundown affairs that look like holdouts from the early 1990s. + +Things have changed over the years of course. AirBnB changed everything everywhere for the worse. Prices are through the roof. We couldn't afford to rent the beach house we used to stay in, but that's okay, we don't rent anymore. These days we head even further away from civilization to the state park at the far end of the island. It's a good twenty minute drive from the campsite to the first signs of the civilization, which is a rarity on the east coast, let alone on the Florida coast. + +We weren't planning to be here for ten days. Campsites on St. George mostly book up a year in advance. But somehow we managed to string together ten nights by scooping up other people's cancellations. We had to move around a lot, but luckily that's not hard here. + +Apalachicola has changed + +There’s nothing about this place that even hints at the world of resorts and all-inclusive packages. And that’s the way I like it. + + +It’s + ## Bus Work I was scraping the windows one afternoon. It was hot and humid, the Florida sun can feel like a heat lamp in a kitchen, relentless, baking. I was sweating and scraping and the old sealant was warm so it was gummy and not coming off the way it does in cooler weather and I was hot and frustrated and mad and feeling like I'd rather be at the beach and why was I doing this anyway and my daughter walked by and said that's out window. We share it (meaning her and her twin sister). She pointed to the pane that is behind her head and the pane that is behind her sister's head and then she walked off. And I stood there for a minute and thought right, that's why I am doing this, to keep my family warm and dry. |