We made it, but is that west [Florida] coast a strange place! They appear to be making all the same mistakes over again. Slums next to luxury towers, roadways constantly being torn up to repair something not done right in the first place. All is new construction and could have benefited by the mistakes of others. Even said roadways go where they and not you want.
Despite the best efforts of Florida to make it otherwise, Wallace and I had a great time touring the countryside. The strange lack of comprehensible road signs in this State added an element of surprise. We made the expected stop at the Seminole gas station on Alligator Alley. Where we met a charming lady on her way to Sarasota to visit her mother, who is 103.We discovered later, using a travel book published in 1985 in California that we had been on Highway 29. The western half of the River of Grass is a farming community, where apparently nobody speaks English and rodeos have not yet been outlawed. Farm laborers, and the shacks they live in make up most of the down town areas. There is something else I have not seen in three years: hills. Small ones, albeit.
The Gulf coast, locally known as the West coast, is billed as a more tropical setting. In a sense, it is. We drove past miles of jungle. I don’t know if it is the natural cover out there. If you ignore the palm trees it is a lot like driving through Montana. Flat fields with trees growing along the boundaries and ditches. Taking it easy, we arrived in Ft. Myers late in the afternoon. Wow, it is getting hot in the day.
The treat was the Edison museum. It is a quiet walking tour and his preserved office is remarkably similar to my current work area. I believe the desk under this computer was built in 1923. Edison and his partners constructed laboratory to seek alternatives to imported latex and eventually coaxed 12% out of milkweed plants. The advent of synthetic rubber put an end to his research. Although it has been sealed off from souvenir hunters, the work area is fascinating.It reminded me of my old high school chemistry lab. To give you a sense of how isolated the place was in 1900, one of the jobs at the laboratory was “glassblower”. The building is around a hundr
[Author's note 2016-04-11: the remainder of this post has gone missing.]
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