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July, 2018:

The Zen of Traveling

So…I recently took a six-day trip from my home in FL to visit my brother and his family at their new place in North Carolina. I hadn’t seen them since leaving California four years ago, so I figured it was time.

From here to there one way, according to my odometer, is about 825 miles. Definitely doable as a two-day trip each way by car. And I chose to take the car, because I’d never traveled through most of that area before and wanted to.

Spoiler: I had a really good time and a mostly-interesting drive, including getting caught up in a police raid in South Carolina. Memorable times. 🙂

The problem I had more and more as the days went by: There was too much to see, and most of it just went whizzing by my window at slightly over the speed limit of whatever road I was on at the time. Farm stands. Battlefields. Alligator farms. Islands with sightseeing cruises. Waterfront bars. Interesting restaurants. And the more miles I drove, the sadder I got for the missed opportunities.

Granted, I did make some stops, planned and otherwise. But I saw so many more interesting places where I *could* have stopped, in a world with infinite spare time.

Our Western culture is very destination- and goal-oriented. The objective is the destination; get there as fast as you can. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, the journey is as important as the destination. And in Buddhism, the journey (from a root word meaning “day”) can be entirely internal; sitting still and paying attention are valued. One of my favorite contemporary Buddhist sayings is, “Don’t do something, just sit there.”

To me, there’s a balance point somewhere between “sitting there” and “go as fast as you can to get to the destination.” And my balance point isn’t going to be in the same place as anyone else’s. I reach a point where I get tired and/or burn out, long about 4-5 days into most trips, and I have to schedule down time to help me enjoy the last part of longer trips. Other people can go for weeks. Still others, half a day. It’s all good.

For me, I think that what I want to try next year, after my current “dance card” of travel plans is over, is a trip where each night’s stopping point is maybe 4-5 hours down the road. That way, I can take 8-9 hours for that trip and do side excursions, without worrying about being on the road til midnight. And I’d put a rest day in the middle. I’ll let you know how that works out.

This would still involve some trip planning, because many places you need reservations to get into, especially in the busy seasons. I have friends who either live in RVs or who own RVs and travel a lot. And that solves some of the flexibility issue of travel – how far can you go in a day, and how do you know there will be a place where you can sleep when you get there? I don’t know that I’m ever likely to be an RV person. But it’s interesting to contemplate as a part-time solution to the random travel blues.

Where’s your sweet spot, when you travel? Do you like to get there, stay in one place, and then go home? Or are you about the journey? Or some of each?

For me…I think the first of those trips will take me back to northeast Florida, and the stretch from Jacksonville to the Space Coast. And I’ll catch some of the goodies I missed this time and spend a little more time in one or two places I discovered I like. And I won’t have to drive more than about five hours in any one day.

“Excuse me, officer…”

A funny thing happened to me this morning, when I went to get gas for my car.

I started the day in Beaufort SC, on my way to visit my brother in NC. I’d had a fairly nice evening the night before, got in at a reasonable hour, and got on the road relatively early because the Internet at the hotel was spotty so I couldn’t distract myself with it for very long.

Before I could head north, I needed to first head south. I’d tweaked my left knee in the middle of the night because, things at different heights in my motel room than at home. That’s all the context I’m giving you. And one of the things I left at home was my knee brace. So I figured I’d go get a spare, and searched Google Maps for the nearest CVS or Walgreens. There was one about three miles south of me in Port Royal, so I decided to head there.

On the way, I noticed that the car was ready for more gas. It gets great mileage, but still needs to be fed now and then. So when I spotted a convenience mart/gas station with good pricing, I stopped in. I had to wait a bit to give the people my money, because several other folks were in there getting other things that had nothing to do with gasoline. And in fact, I remarked to myself, “It’s strange that the hardest thing to buy at a gas station is gas.”

But I gave them the twenty and went to fill the car. Topped it up to $18.50 worth of gas, hung up the nozzle, and as I turned to go back in for my change, half a dozen cop cars pulled in. Two blocked the driveways, and the rest drove in, found parking, and discharged members of law enforcement who started heading toward the store.

This is at roughly 8:40 AM. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, but after all my years in California, my first thought is, “Do I have to take cover before someone starts shooting?” Not someplace my brain was equipped to go at that early hour. I tried to catch the eye of one of the officers; nobody was paying me any attention. I thought about driving away, but I knew there was still $1.50 inside that store that belonged to me. So I started slowly and cautiously sidling in the direction of the building.

This caught the attention of one of the police officers, who said, “They’re closed because we need to serve a search warrant.” I replied, “I’ve got a buck fifty in change coming; can I get that, or should I just go away?” The officer told me I could go get my change.

So I went inside. On the way, three other officers also tried to tell me the place was closed, and to each of them I repeated my story *and* that the other officer had told me I could go get my change.

Finally I get inside. There were two people working in there; an older man and an older woman. When I went in, they were just handcuffing the man, and I overheard something about, “You can’t sell that in this state.” I have no clue what “that” was. After waiting a few minutes while they were sorting stuff out (and a fifth officer attempted to tell me the store was closed, to which I repeated my sad tale and volunteered to abandon my twelve bits if it would help), the woman was allowed to go over to the register, where my change was already awaiting me on top of the register. I took it, thanked her, and made a rapid and polite exit. Drove around the end of one of the blockading cop cars (he waved me on), and went on down the street to the Rite-Aid, where I found my new knee brace.

I have no clue what was going on besides what I’m describing. There was a younger woman there who’d been in the store when I was buying gas; after I came out from getting my change, she was talking with one of the officers. I don’t know whether it was just “small town” and they knew each other, or if perhaps she’d gone in as an undercover buyer after the cops got a report. Could have been either.

So that was my little adventure with a police raid in Beaufort County SC this morning. It’s amazing how one can have a guilty conscience even without doing anything wrong; I was keeping an eye over my shoulder until somewhat after I crossed the county line.

I didn’t take pictures; I figured that might be in bad taste.

I got tickets for tonight’s Mega Millions lottery while I was there. On the off chance I win something, I hope that whatever the guy working inside was nabbed for it doesn’t invalidate the tickets.

Update: One of my better-motivated friends (thanks, Janet!) tracked down the story. Turns out someone at the station was selling fake pee – synthetic urine for beating drug tests.

It really doesn’t get much stranger than that.

Dead fish…

We’re having a bout of red tide here in Englewood. It’s not as bad as it was a few days ago, thankfully. But a week or so ago it was pretty horrid, and lots of fish (and the occasional dolphin, turtle, and manatee) died. That’s pretty tragic.

Red tide is a semi-regular occurrence here on Florida’s Gulf Coast. It’s effects from the life cycle of a microscopic organism that lives in the waters here. It poisons fish and puts something into the air that can affect people’s respiratory systems. For me personally, it gets into my throat and I start to cough. If I’m in it for a while, it gets into my sinuses, which obligingly clog up. It’s not a fun thing, and when it’s happening I need to stay away from the water. Which of course is no fun at all.

While it is a naturally-occurring organism, there are environmental factors which can supercharge it. Primary among those are discharges of nutrient-laden water. We’ve got a few sources of those, but the worst two I’ve noticed are when a sewage system overflows (as happened a couple of years ago up around Tampa after a really bad set of storms) or when we have mandated discharges from Lake Okeechobee out the Caloosahatchee river during our rainy season. (And out the St. Lucie River on the Atlantic side, but I don’t have to deal with it over there.)

And thereby hangs a tale.

Some decades back, the Army Corps of Engineers rejiggered the flow of water that used to just filter nicely south from Lake O into the Everglades. They dammed a lot of it up and sent it out the rivers to the east and west. This of course messed up the entire ecosystem of the Glades, and folks have been trying halfhearted remedies to keep things alive since then. This involves attempting to strike devils’ bargains with folks like the big sugar growers south of Lake O and a whole lot of money, none of which seems to be making the South Florida ecosystem any healthier. Not sure what links would be best to bring folks up to date on this, so I’ll leave it to y’all to google your own info.

Meanwhile, the tourism industry – which relies in no small part on beaches that people want to spend time on – has been suffering as a result of this, from Naples to Venice. I can think of at least two waterfront restaurants here in Englewood that closed for at least one and possibly more days because, red tide. All through no fault of their own.

Are there solutions? Possibly. But they’re not comfortable solutions for folks who make a living off the status quo. Cutting the use of fertilizers on farmland, or making sure that there are swales and catchments to keep fertilizer excess from getting into the waterways is one possible remedy. But that’s hard to do, because Florida has these vigorous downpours now and then, especially in the summertime, and once you get up over half an inch or so of rain in an hour, it’s hard to build a drainage/retention system that won’t overflow. At least without spending beaucoup bucks.

Restoring more of the natural laminar flow through the Everglades might help, but that would likely involve a lot of work to add more drainage/throughflow under I-75 and US-41 (Alligator Alley) across the Glades in south Florida. Which wouldn’t be cheap, in a state that doesn’t seem to spend a whole lot of money on updating infrastructure and that isn’t likely to increase taxes anytime soon. It would also make it harder for what we call “Big Sugar” to continue extracting their profits out of their lands south of Lake O.

And it would involve viewing our land and our Everglades as living organisms that require proper care to stay healthy. Which would go against large chunks of our current cultural paradigm, sad to say.

Meanwhile, fish and other critters are dying, and businesses are losing money. And it stinks.

Literally.