Vacation Travel – Fort Myers Florida Weekly

What about a short break?

No joke, it can change your vision — give you 20/20 if yours is a little blurry of late. But I once saw “Guns and Music” when a distant tree or a traffic sign or red neon flickered in the window of a small store in Memphis.

That was perfect for me. I’d rather it just read “Tons of Music” these days. And maybe it does. I haven’t been back to Memphis since ’85, helping a friend move from Virginia to northwest Arkansas. If you’re not sure, it was 1985, not 1885.

Traveling there — and meeting a harmonica player in the Mississippi Delta south of Memphis — Willie Foster once took a bus trying to get to Chicago but ended up in St. Louis. Windy City for not being able to read – now gives me 20/20 vision, more or less.

For me, that means seeing how the planet works and how Americans can move a little faster to improve things. And it means seeing why we aren’t, and what remains so wonderfully, so beautifully about us.

Here’s one of the wildest paradoxes you’ll see about Americans if they travel: We colonized and then colonized the New World emerging from 3,000 years of European civilization. But paradoxically, we last fought the bloodiest and most desperate war in our national history.

If you travel to the Virginia home of our founding fathers, places like Mt. Vernon (George Washington) or Monticello (Thomas Jefferson) – the men who broke America from its ancient class and religious prejudices, gave us free speech and the separation of church and state “from these shores the endless strife that bloodied the soil of Europe for centuries.” To last forever” as James Madison (Montpellier) put it – you will also see their active participation in ownership. In the 400 year history of slavery. Let it be instilled in our blood to avoid racial injustice from other Americans (led by Lincoln, who was born and raised in a log cabin).

That is some kind of occurrence. But any trip, big or small, is worth it if you want a better view.

Say you work in marketing or sales or finance, or you own a small business. Say you live in a cozy house in a cozy town. Perhaps you’ve described traveling to more comfortable places, often on beaches or on ships where smiling staff serve you food and drinks.

In that case, even though the landscape has changed, you are not traveling properly.

Instead, you might consider going to Uncle Joe’s Fish Camp, perched on Lake Okeechobee near Clewiston, where mosquitoes the size of Focke-Wulf dive bombs (German, WWII) never appear in groups of less than 100 some nights, and you sleep. You sit on an old bed in a small four-square room and — whether you fish or not — walk 100 feet to a dock, looking out over the sawdust and water, topped with the occasional alligator or turtle head.

That’s a vacation trip.

Or take a trip to one of Florida’s special protected wildernesses—say, Big Cypress Preserve or Everglades National Park, Fakahachi Beach, or Ten Thousand Islands or Archbold Biological Station in Lake Wales Valley Country. A million years.

nice. But to see it more clearly, you need to go to a spa and resort hotel and see how the other half (or 90%) lives.

That’s a vacation trip.

My oldest son, Evan Williams, a Florida weekly writer and photographer (perhaps unrelated to the whiskey) did last year when he moved to Los Angeles after many years in the Sunshine State. And my little boy Nash, who did just that, just got back from his first long trip to Yosemite National Park last week with his friend Grant Rogers.

Just because you want to see it and bag it in the park.

For Florida boys, it’s a tough hike: from about a foot above sea level to the foot of El Capitan, a granite cliff that rises 3,000 feet above the valley floor to 7,500 feet above sea level. That is 2½ times the height of the Empire State Building and three times the height of the Eiffel Tower.

You have to go see it. ¦