After a few weeks of exploring the panhandle, south Florida, and the Gulf Coast I’m now based on the Atlantic side of the state in Ormond-by-the-Sea, a quiet beach community just north of Daytona.
Continue reading “There’s More to Florida Than the Sand and the Sea”
I’ve stayed at a couple dozen AirBnB properties over the last few years and though some have been simply amazing and others simply average, I really can’t say I’ve had a truly bad experience with finding lodgings using this website. Until now.
Continue reading “The AirBnB from Heck”It’s been over a year since I left my home of 30 years, San Francisco, and I have yet to put down any permanent roots. Officially, home is in Tennessee, but I’ve been spending lots of time in New England, took a summer road trip out to Utah for a few weeks, and have found myself repeatedly drawn to Florida. I’ve always been drawn to the ocean, and the easy access to beautiful swimming beaches, warm waters, and soft sand has made Florida a serious contender for a place I think I’d like to live.
When I’d cover the topic of hurricanes in the course on Natural Disasters that I taught for many years at my former university, I’d sometimes joke that these storms seemed to have an uncanny knack, an amazing ability to aim for highly vulnerable mobile home parks. Well, not unlike a Category 5 hurricane, I recently cut a swath across Florida’s midsection from the Gulf to the Atlantic, and while mobile home parks remained safe and untouched, every highly rated restaurant on tripadvisor.com was directly in my path. Hurricane Matt, the first unofficial storm of the 2021 Hurricane Season, left his mark on the Sunshine State. Let’s retrace the path of this culinary storm.
It was about 6PM when I arrived at my AirBnB rental in Pensacola Beach, located at the far western end of the Florida Panhandle. It was raining as I dragged my luggage up three flights of stairs on an outside stairwell. Only later did I discover that there was an elevator in the building! A cold wind bore down upon me, nearly ripping the glass storm door from its hinges as I fought to type in the key code to get into my apartment. It was 44 degrees and the weather report was calling for lows in the mid-20s that night. This was not exactly the way I’d envisioned my winter getaway to sunny Florida to begin.
MATT: AT HOME IN THE WORLD 