Answering the Call of Florida

by mattathomeintheworld, posted in Blogs, Florida, U.S.A.

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.

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I Still Have Faith in ABBA!

by mattathomeintheworld, posted in Music

Because I turned 18 years old in 1976, my musical tastes have always been firmly grounded in music of the late 1970s. For the majority of my adult life, as I described in a previous post, Fleetwood Mac was by far my favorite band, but two other groups also come to mind when reflecting upon my musical preferences: Blondie and ABBA.

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A Golden State of Mind: Chapter 1 – California Dreaming

by mattathomeintheworld, posted in Blogs, California, U.S.A.

In just under a week from now, I’ll be leaving California after having lived here for the past 38 years. With this impending move and the ample time that the COVID crisis has provided for self-reflection, I’ve been pondering my long and often complicated relationship with “The Golden State.” I’ve decided to describe how this relationship began long before I ever stepped foot in California, and how it grew and changed over the course of my life. This will be the first in a series of relatively short posts or “chapters” that focus on different periods in my relationship with California. In this first entry I’ll describe how my fascination with California began and set the stage for my eventual move to the Golden State.

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A Golden State of Mind: Chapter 2 – Southern California

by mattathomeintheworld, posted in Blogs, California, U.S.A.
Arrival in Southern California, August 1983

In the first chapter of my California saga I recounted my childhood obsession with the Golden State and my first visits there as a teenager in April and June of 1975. A year later I graduated from high school and began attending a local university only a few miles from home in Massachusetts. Therefore, the California Dream was relegated to a back burner for awhile.

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A Golden State of Mind: Chapter 4 – The San Francisco Years

by mattathomeintheworld, posted in Blogs, California, U.S.A.

This is the final chapter of my story about my “relationship” with California. It’s been several months since I posted Chapter 3 and I procrastinated in finishing it because it’s not the most uplifting part of the story and I have a hunch that things I say will put some people off. But today is the one year anniversary of my departure from California and this seemed like the right time to finish the tale and close the book.

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Hurricane Matt: The Unusual Storm That Ate Its Way Across Florida

by mattathomeintheworld, posted in Blogs, Florida, Travel Recommendations, USA Roadtrips

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.

Hurricane Matt brewing in the Gulf?
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A Month of “Panhandling”: An Idyllic Stay in Pensacola Beach, Florida

by mattathomeintheworld, posted in Blogs, Florida

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.

A spectacular sunset on Pensacola Beach
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Navigating the COVID Minefield: A Five Month Long Journey

by mattathomeintheworld, posted in Blogs, Psychology of Travel, USA Roadtrips

If you’re like me, the LAST thing you probably want to read about at this point is anything related to COVID. And yet, we also all know that it is an unavoidable topic of conversation, whether we like it or not. Rest assured that this will ultimately be a travel blog, but I really can’t tell the tale without bringing up the pandemic.

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