Travel & Transportation

We’ve stayed at 14 Airbnbs by now on this caper (including the short term stays on way to the longer stays), and if you were to ask me what the most unexpected request by an owner was, I would have to say it was to “please keep the trash bin lids secured to keep the bears from scattering trash all over the yard.” Okay, yes, being from Maine that’s not that odd sounding and we’ve stayed at some places where bear issues wouldn’t be surprising (cabin in the woods across the river from Louisville, house in the hills outside of Rapid City…). But this was on the Florida coast.

When you rent a house with the marsh and Santa Rosa Sound on one side and a swamp on the other side you do expect to see some wildlife. In fact, that was the major reason we chose that location. But bears?

So, don’t feed the bears! Or the gators and snakes either, as the sign by our swamp warned.

We never did see a bear or an alligator while in Florida for January.  But we did have a snake visitor. He liked to sun on the rock wall between the yard and the swamp. It was either a non-venomous southern water snake or a venomous cottonmouth. The shape of the eye is one way to tell them apart – I passed on getting close enough to make that distinction!

^{About three feet long; we let him sleep wherever he wanted to.}

^{Tiny frogs were frequent visitors all over the patio.}

 It wasn’t until we left Florida and got to a short layover in Lafayette, LA that we saw alligators. And that involved deliberately taking a tour of a swamp to find them. Sitting in the 12-seat skiff next to a nest of baby alligators with the mother lying close by was thrilling while being quite safe. And then the guide told us how high alligators can raise themselves out of the water, basically their body length. Yikes! Later we learned that these ‘gators were peaceful and that people even swam in parts of the water’. Again, yikes!

These pseudo-dangers of our journey remind me of something I read recently. In his book Deep South Paul Theroux wrote about how for travel narratives the story is the difficulty of the journey, the miseries of getting from one place to another. Theroux proposes that in modern times, especially in America, the journey is a picnic relative to the real hardships encountered in earlier, more far-flung travel. Later travel writers have exaggerated, or even manufactured, their hardships. Edward Abby, in his Desert Solitaire, fails to mention that for five months of his time facing the bleak elements of nature alone, he lived in a trailer with his wife and son, not far from a saloon frequented by his drinking buddies. John Steinbeck, it’s been noted, stayed at luxurious hotels for much of the travel he describes as struggling through a big and dangerous world.

From our pseudo-dangerous encounter in the swamps of Lafayette, LA we traveled to Georgetown, TX. Our biggest travel ordeal was not finding a Starbucks for our ‘road-day latte’ tradition and trying a Dunkin Donuts latte instead (the horror!). Georgetown, our February stay, is a town of about 70,000, about 30 miles north of Austin, built along the San Gabriel River. The little historic downtown has shops, restaurants, bars, museums operating in the 19^th century buildings surrounding the town square. Georgetown is known as the red poppy capital of Texas for these wildflowers that grow throughout the area.

^{Images of poppies abound. Seeds for poppies were sent here right after WWI by a soldier from Georgetown. His mother planted them and then they spread and became a symbol of remembrance and hope for a peaceful future.}

^{One of the historic Victorian buildings in downtown Georgetown; this was a Masonic Lodge.}

An exhibit in the historical museum there reflects the stark contrast between real travel ordeals and mock travel ordeals. They have a diary kept by cowboy Robert McMordie during a cattle drive that originated in the county in April of 1886. Most days he just notes the number of miles they moved (generally 10 – 20 miles). But on April 15^th he wrote of a night of record hail and stampeding cattle. Sunday the 16^th, they “hunted Stampeded cattle until Dinner Hearded in the Evening.” On May 13^th the entry reads, “Drove Ten miles to the River the Cattle Stopped & refused to travel for 2 hours.” Some entries mention broken axles, being chased by Indians, and hauling dead bodies.

Fortunately we didn’t have to herd stampeded cattle, ford swollen rivers, or fix a broken axle. But we’re headed west, to Arizona and New Mexico so there’s still a chance we’ll have to face some ordeal, or at least manufacture one for a good story! Stay tuned.

Other photos of January and February:

^{The white sands of Florida are amazing. Made up of quartz crystals washed down from the Appalachian mountains by rivers to the Gulf. I noticed that it doesn’t stick to your feet like Maine beach sand does.}

^{What could be a real travel ordeal, tangling with jellyfish while wading in the ocean. We saw lots of Moon jellyfish and Lion’s Mane jellyfish on the Santa Rosa Sounds side of Navarre Beach.}

^{Shells on the beaches of the Gulf Island National Seashore Park. Despite lots of searching I never found a fossilized shark tooth.}

^{Clay effigies from the Indian Temple Mound Museums in Fort Walton. The mound was built around 850 AD. Early Europeans in the area were surprised that the local Native Americans at that time had no idea who had built it or what it was used for.}

^{Sculpture at the Zilker Botanical Garden; explored this with Maine friends Rhonda and Tom, as well as one of the many sculpture gardens.}

^{Inner Space Caverns, discovered in Georgetown, TX just about 60 years ago when the highway was being made. If the highway had been a bit east or west of where it was this still might not have been discovered. Deepest spot about 70 feet deep, lots of prehistoric horse, deer, camel, bear and pigs bones found, as well as an anteater-like animal that was about the size of a Volkswagen.}

^{The view of Lake Travis from The Oasis, a quirky “castle” of shops, restaurants, bars, all filled with weird decor, on a bluff high over Lake Travis that Scott and Christine brought us to.}

^{Gus wants you to know that he faces travel ordeals too. Here he confronts one on an overnight farm stay enroute to Georgetown. Although it may have been more of an ordeal for the Lab than for Gus.}