Reflections on a brief visit to Florida
I visited my parents in Florida with my girlfriend last week. This was not the first time I went to Florida, or the second, or the third, or the tenth. I’ve been to Florida so many times. Outside of the states that I’ve lived in (Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey), it is by far the state I’ve spent the most time in.
This isn’t really by choice. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like Florida fine in terms of geography. It’s warm, sunny, and generally pretty along the coast, and it provides a welcome respite from New England’s harsh winters. It’s the self-interested mentality of Florida that I’ve never liked1. Florida, perhaps more than any other state, has turned its mentality into a self-perpetuating mythology. Those who are attracted to the way Florida portrays itself tend to move there, which strengthens the Florida mentality. This periodically erupts into Florida headlines, adding more color into the Florida mythology and driving more people who are attracted by that to move there.
But my parents are there. So I go there and spend time with my parents, just as I went when I was little to play tennis at vacation resorts2.
This time, as I mentioned, I went with my girlfriend, who is relatively new to the US in general and has never been to Florida before. So, I once again got to play the part of tour guide with her, just as I had in California, and see Florida through fresh eyes. Here was our experience.
West Palm Beach airport
1. The West Palm Beach airport is an eminently functional airport. It’s small, easy to get through, and technically has restaurant options, if you count Chili’s as a restaurant.
2. Its advertisements are for surgeons (especially plastic surgeons), real estate, and, new to the airport this year, a lifesized dinosaur advertising a dino safari. There are almost no advertisements directed at business travelers.
3. The population of the airport is predominantly a mixture of the incredibly old, families with small children, and, weirdly enough, ultra Orthodox Jews. Childless adults visiting their parents (like myself) are a small but significant minority.
4. It’s easy enough to take an Uber or car from the airport to your destination from the airport. This is good, because there are literally no public transportation options. Literally none. Every time I check Google Maps for public transportation in Florida, it suggests walking or taking a Lyft. That’s not a joke.
The Palm Beach area
1. My parents live in Palm Beach County. Palm Beach County’s most notable function is to serve as a container for gated communities, including the Trump National Golf Club, which Wikipedia informs me that Trump once hosted Shinzo Abe at. Palm Beach County also serves as a container for many drug and alcohol rehabilitation communities, which have specialized in ripping off health insurance companies by unnecessarily urine testing their patients without actually helping their patients get better. The drug and alcohol rehab facilities have supposedly cleaned up their act since the major scandals were last unveiled (2017), but I doubt it.
2. Trump’s flagship property and residence, Mar-a-Lago, is also in Palm Beach County. When Trump was president, he would regularly shut down all the highways and the airport so that he could travel to and from Mar-a-Lago. This was incredibly annoying and I’m not looking forward to him doing it again.
3. My parents do not live in a Trump branded gated community. They do live in a gated community, and it is heavily Trump supporting, and it does contain at least one current member of Trump’s inner circle, but it is not Trump branded. Thank goodness for small miracles.
My parents’ gated community
1. The most important thing to note about my parents’ gated community is that it is seriously gated. There are electronic fences, armed guards, patrol cars and patrol boats. This is because everyone in Florida is terrified of everyone else, and so they’ve all armed themselves to the teeth or hired other people to do so.
2. The gated community is accidentally walkable, unlike the rest of Florida. This is because it was built around a golf course, and the paths that were designed for golf carts turn out to be great walking paths as well. That being said, if I do die one day in Florida, it will be because a 70-year-old woman ran me down from behind with her golf cart.
3. It also has great bird watching and animal watching in general. The canals, water traps, bunkers, and sand traps of a golf course are great for creatures of all sorts. While in my parents’ gated community, we saw ospreys, cranes, egrets, ducks, anoles, and iguanas. Unfortunately, many of the most beautiful creatures are actually descended from escaped pets and so are invasive. On the other hand, so are we.
4. One remarkable sound that can be heard late at night outside of the gated community: trains. Florida’s recently built a quite nice, privately funded passenger train connecting south Florida’s major cities called Brightline. As it turns out, if you just let people build things, private industry can build infrastructure and make it profitable. If you don’t let them build things, then all the public funding in the world won’t help you (looking at you, California and also Massachusetts).
Florida outside gated communities
1. My girlfriend and I tried to get outside the gated community where we could. This involved borrowing my parents’ SUV and boating it around the Florida highways. Florida, contrary to popular belief, does have both sidewalks and bike lanes. Unfortunately, everything is spaced incredibly far apart, so walking on the sidewalk usually involves walking for at least a mile with a highway on one side and dense underbrush on the other. Biking involves biking on unprotected bike lanes while old people and people currently rehabilitating from cocaine zoom by you at 90 miles per hour in a Mercedes.
As a result, for the most part, nobody walks or bikes. People do walk in the strip malls, usually from their car to the door and back. While it’s possible to walk in one strip mall, walking from one to another is difficult, even if they are on the same side of the highway. If they are on opposite sides, it’s impossible, as there are zero crosswalks. Getting from one strip mall that’s on the north-going side to another on the south-going side involves either running across 6 lanes of traffic (which we did a couple times) or getting in your car to drive 30 seconds total.
2. The strip malls themselves actually have quite a few fun little shops. Real estate is cheap and parking is plentiful in Florida. Zoning is also very permissive, so it’s easy to set up a random restaurant or store and start selling stuff pretty quickly. I’m not saying this makes Florida a cultural mecca by any stretch, but it is a lot better than it could be. While we were there, we got serviceable French and Venezuelan food, and almost went to a place offering Korean spa services.
3. Going along with the wildlife theme, while we were there, we visited a zoo/rehab facility and a sea turtle rescue. Both of these were fun little spots that, amazingly, were completely donation-based. You can go there without paying a dime, if you are so inclined. As it was, I spent $50 for the zoo, which was kind of an accidental rip-off because their only animals are animals they are currently rehabilitating. At least we got to see black bears, a hyperactive otter, and an incredibly neurotic raccoon.
4. Our big trip was to Fort Lauderdale, which was about an hour’s drive. Fort Lauderdale is famous for its Riverwalk, which is really a short walk alongside a canal. The canal itself is unimpressive and would take about 30 seconds to swim across, but it is impressive how many condos they managed to stick next to it and how many large boats they managed to put into it. One of the largest boats was called Rearden Steel, which was a fun reference. Anyways, the highlight of that trip for both of us was a dove who perched on the rotating weathervane on top of one of the boats and seemed to be having a great time spinning around.
Final ratings for Florida
4.5/5 for weather and natural beauty, 2/5 for culture, 5/5 for aggressive signs on boats.
Note: when I say Florida in the following essay, I mean southeast Florida unless stated otherwise. I haven’t spent a lot of time elsewhere in Florida. Florida, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is basically divided up into the following sections:
1. North Florida, which is culturally South and still misses slavery.
2. Orlando, which is a subsidiary of Disney Inc.
3. Southeast Florida, which is part of the migratory path of Jewish Northerners and associated.
4. Southwest Florida, which is where I believe Midwestern retirees live, although I literally have never been there.
5. Miami, which is the capital of Latin America.
One of the resorts we went to, Saddlebrook, has fallen into a state of apparently horrendous disrepair after being bought by developers from Miami in a firesale. The other one, the Colony, has been demolished completely. Sudden rises to and falls from grace are par for the course in Florida. I assume my parents’ gated community will also suddenly fall apart in 20 years.