A Lap Around America

by Shawn Inmon

  I found another memorial to stop at in Islamorada. It’s a memorial to the victims of the Labor Day Storm of 1935. Some people refer to it as The Wrong Way Memorial. Why? Because the carving shows palm trees bent over by high winds. The problem is that the palm trees are shown blowing to the east. Since the storm came from that direction, the trees should be blowing the other direction. Eh. I think some people could find other things to worry about. I focused more on the fact that the bodies of 300 of the storm’s victims are buried near the memorial.

  Things were very different in 1935, of course. Transportation wasn’t always reliable, and the science of meteorology was crude compared with today. There was no Highway 1 that ran the length of the Keys —the only way off was via boat or train.

  On the day the storm hit—Labor Day, 1935—a train was dispatched to rescue a group of veterans who were working on the Keys, along with some civilians. In a comedy of errors that seems almost unbelievable, the train was delayed again and again. Eventually the storm, one of the few Category Five hurricanes to retain that designation at landfall, swept over the Keys, killing almost everyone in its path, including those trying to escape via the train.

  So many places we’ve visited in the South, including the Keys, New Orleans and Galveston, have been decimated by storm after storm. Dawn and I live now on an ocean beach that sits over a famous fault line. If it shifts and “the big one” hits, we will be in major trouble. The odds of that happening in any given year are remote, though, so it is easy to put it out of our minds. It is hard for me to imagine living in an area where it is possible that a storm can change your lives at any time. I feel for the people of the Gulf Coast. They are a brave and hardy lot.

  We made it across the Keys, around Miami, and up to West Palm Beach before we stopped for the night. We found the Hotel Biba, self-described as an artsy boutique hotel. After so many years working as a Realtor, I should have been able to decipher what that meant. Artsy means weird. Boutique means tiny and cramped. Once again, although the room was small, the place was saved by having a fine swimming pool.

  It started to rain while we were in the pool. Fat, heavy, warm drops plopped down on our heads and splashed the pool. It was pleasant, even a little romantic, until the thunder and lightning hit, then we headed for the room.

  Day Twenty-Nine

  We’d been in Florida for nearly a week and had yet to see a manatee, but I had a plan to change that. As Dawn was driving the previous day, I’d found a spot in West Palm Beach that Florida Power & Light had built to highlight the manatees. It’s not a zoo, just a peaceful spot for them along their normal route to stop, rest, and rejuvenate.

  We knew we’d found it when we spotted the giant statue of two manatees in the parking lot. The impressive information building was modern, full of light, and had many informative displays. Outside, we walked along the waterways, waiting for one of the huge creatures to reveal itself. We waited, then waited some more.

  “We must be looking in the wrong place, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll go ask.”

  I went back to the lady behind the first counter inside and said, “We’ve been looking for quite a while and haven’t seen anything that looks vaguely like a manatee. Are we looking in the wrong place?”

  “Oh, no, you’re in the right place, just the wrong time. We haven’t had any manatees about for several days.”

  I broke the news to Dawn, who salved her pain with a lengthy visit to the gift shop. We might not have found a manatee in the flesh, but a magnetic one will adorn our refrigerator forever.

  That left us with some unexpected time on our hands, not to mention an overburdened suitcase full of dirty clothes in the trunk, so we sought out a laundromat.

  Here’s one thing I’ve learned on our trip: Laundromats are essentially the same no matter where you go. The slightly musty smell, the humidity of drying clothes, the same year-old magazines scattered about, the same broken pop machine.

  We nearly had an accident, as Dawn accidentally left her key to the Silver Bullet in her pants pocket when she threw her laundry in. Typically, it’s not a huge deal to wash your keys, but because the Silver Bullet is almost new, it has one of those newfangled electronic keys that can do everything but massage your feet for you. Electronics don’t like to be washed, tumbled, and rinsed.

  As soon as Dawn realized what had happened, I ran to the machine, but it locked automatically while running. The lady who ran the place was able to shut the machine off so it would unlock. Except, she turned off the wrong machine.

  That meant that we had to pay to restart both machines we had going—a small price to pay to save the key—but as soon as the water drained away, we retrieved it. I’m not sure how Hyundai builds their keys, but I am impressed. Dripping wet as it was, it still unlocked the doors and trunk. Another tragedy averted.

  We found it difficult to plot a sensible route to Orlando without using major roads, so we bit the bullet and took the freeway north. One thing we will not miss about Florida is the toll roads. Every time we turned around, it felt like we were getting dinged for $2 here, $4 there. Eventually, I learned to just keep a stack of bills handy.

  Orlando, of course, holds several of the world’s most famous theme parks, Disney World and Universal Studios among them. Our friend Knutty Gerry (the “K” is not silent, by the way) works at Universal Studios and offered to give us a day pass to both of the Universal parks. How could we say no?

  We met with Knutty and bought him dinner as a thank-you for the passes, then failed to avail ourselves of Orlando nightlife. Instead, we took advantage of staying at The Point Orlando Resort, which was several cuts above our normal accommodations. We relaxed in the spacious room, swam in the huge pool and pretended we were rich people for a few hours. We like how the other half lives.

  Day Thirty

  I am not the biggest fan of amusement parks. A few too many people all gathered in one space for my taste. Dawn, however, loves them. If we lived near Disneyland, I would have to get her an annual pass. Plus, I love to travel, while Dawn is more of a homebody, so I figured I might owe her a little something.

  We’d spent a happy day at Disneyland on our honeymoon, so we followed the same game plan for Universal Studios: get there early, hit as many popular attractions as possible before the park fills to capacity. From there? Stand in line and be patient.

  We started at Islands of Adventure, which is next to Universal Studios and connected to it by the Hogwarts Express. Because, of course, Universal is the home of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

  In the interest of full disclosure, I need to say that Dawn and I are both huge Harry Potter fans. I read the first four books to my girls before they got too big and read on ahead without me. We’ve both read all seven HP books and seen all eight movies. On trips with my girls, I used to play games such as trying to remember a hundred characters without peeking into the books. It’s not easy, but we got there.

  The three primary rides associated with Harry Potter didn’t thrill us much. They were all very frantic, twisty, roller coaster-ish rides. Neither of us is a big fan of that type of ride. However, there was a lot of The Wizarding World that we really liked. The Hogwarts Express, for instance, could have just been a tram between parks, but it’s not. You sit inside compartments exactly as described in the books, and scenes and characters make appearances both inside and outside the train. We loved that.

  Also, they got Diagon Alley just right. It’s rare for me to see something in the physical world that I’ve read about and have it match my mental image perfectly, but it happened today. All the shops and pubs that were mentioned in the books were there—The Leaky Cauldron, Ollivanders Wand Shop, Gringots, etc.

  In the Harry Potter section of the park, we appreciated most the parts that closely echoed the books or movies. We can ride roller coasters and dipsy-do rides anywhere, but it was very cool to be able to feel like we were stepping into the pages of some of our favorite books.


  While we were walking through Diagon Alley, an alarm went off and a large crew of park employees rushed to cordon off half the area. The alarm continued to blare, over and over, for about fifteen minutes while we stood there, waiting to see if we could get into some of the other attractions.

  Eventually, we gave up and went elsewhere. Which brings me to a point: It’s difficult not to compare Universal Studios to one of the Disney parks. To us, it seemed Universal Studios fell a bit short of the gold standard that Disney sets. When we arrived, we saw that several rides were down for various reasons. Okay, that happens. Later, it was announced that another of the major rides, based on The Incredible Hulk, was shut down for the rest of the day.

  The worst experience for us was the new King Kong ride. Not the ride itself, which was fun, but the experience of getting there. It’s not unusual for the parks to design lines so that you can’t tell how far you are from the actual ride. It’s all psychology, I suppose.

  When we entered the ride area, signs said we were thirty minutes from getting on. That’s not terrible, so we got in line. The line twists and turns, ever-downward, in increasingly tight corridors. The good news is, as you head underground, it gets cooler. But you can never see more than thirty feet or so ahead before the route twists away again. This keeps hope alive.

  After we had descended down, down, down, into the labyrinth, the loudspeakers announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, the ride is momentarily not working. We are aware of the problem and hope to have it back up shortly,” or some such. We stood in place for about fifteen minutes before a second announcement declared that things were A-OK, and we started moving again. Then the first announcement came again. Then the second. It felt like we were doing the Hurry Up and Wait Tango. Then a third verse, same as the first.

  As a writer, I’m always observing people and thinking: How would I write this scene into a book? We had one of those moments at the King Kong ride. We had finally turned the corner and could see the actual tram we were to ride in. We were to be the next group to go. Then, another round of announcements: “We’re sorry …”

  Fifteen feet from the ride, we had no idea how long it was going to be shut down. Five park employees were on the other side of the rope, four essentially doing nothing. The fifth was in a world of his own, play-acting as though he were actually in a King Kong movie, pretend-talking on his walkie talkie, playing the whole scene as though auditioning for a role in A Streetcar Named Desire. He twirled his arms, raised and lowered his voice, and desperately tried to get the other employees to play along.

  They didn’t, but after a while, I thought I could read their minds: Matthew, you are such a dweeb, you are making us all look bad. For the first ten minutes or so, I found him mildly amusing, but after that, he veered off into a place where the crowd wanted to feed him to Kong.

  In all, we spent about 90 minutes in the dank underground corridors of King Kong. The ride was good once we got on it. It was a great combination of virtual reality, motion-activated monsters and scary fun. Still, I’m not sure I’d have been willing to spend an hour and half in an underground passage for five minutes of fun, if I’d known in advance how long it would take. This is why I am not the ideal amusement park patron.

  In the final analysis, we got to the park just as it opened, stayed until it closed, and had a great time. There’s no place better than a huge amusement park for people-watching, except maybe McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, where every face tells a story. It had started to drizzle a bit by the time we got to the bus that would return us to our hotel, and, typical of these storms, within four steps, it absolutely poured on us. Fifty very wet people on a single bus made for a steamy ride home, but we got there safe and sound.

  Dawn’s natural body clock keeps her up until midnight or later every night. I can count on one hand the nights she falls asleep before me. This was one. I think the excitement of the park and the 16,000 steps we logged on our Fitbits did her in.

  Another pleasant vacation from our vacation, but tomorrow, we would be ready to hit the road once again, because we were finally turning north in earnest.

  Day Thirty-One

  Aside from the humidity, we’d loved our time in Florida. There was so much to see and do. Nonetheless, we were ready to move on and see some different license plates.

  Before leaving Florida, we made one more stop, and it turned out to be one of our favorites: St. Augustine. Towns tend to have a personality, a vibe, a culture. The vibe in St. Augustine is wonderful. The streets are clean, the architecture is old, Spanish, and gorgeous, and everyone we met smiled and chatted with us. It goes on our short list of towns we’d like to return to.

  One building that made a real impact on us was the Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine, built in the 1790s. In Washington state, our history just doesn’t go back to the eighteenth century. Minutes later, we found ourselves visiting a fort that dated back to the seventeenth century.

  Construction on the Castillo de San Marcos started in 1672, but it wasn’t finished for several decades. The harbor that it guards was strategically well placed, so it saw several battles and sieges. The fort was built by the Spanish while they were still a major world power, to defend the city of St. Augustine. Its walls, made of coral rock, were a strong defense against cannons. When a cannonball hit the coral walls, they absorbed the blow without crumbling. The British, it’s said, described attacking the Castillo de San Marcos as being like stabbing a piece of cheese with a knife. Damage, yes, but not devastating.

  The fort was as close to impenetrable as any. It was heavily armed with cannons, making it nearly impossible for opposing forces to gain entry by placing ladders against the walls. Because it was built on typically wet Florida soil, tunneling beneath it was also impossible. The cannon defenses also made it difficult for ships to sit in the harbor and shoot at will.

  The fort looks essentially the same today as it did centuries ago. It is easy to climb the bell tower, look out into the bay, and imagine living the life of an eighteenth-century soldier. We saw the barracks, too, so I can tell you they weren’t exactly living in luxury.

  Because the fort was so impenetrable, opposing forces would lay siege to it rather than attack outright. Then the townspeople would crowd within its walls and subsist as best they could until one side or the other gave up.

  We spent a few hours walking around the shops and cafes of St. Augustine but knew we needed to head north if we wanted to get to Georgia by nightfall. We got on Highway A1A. Interstate 95 would have been faster, but A1A offered much better views of the Atlantic and gave us our last chance to walk on lovely Florida white-sand beaches. Dawn also found a lot of beautiful shells on the beach, which sat in the cup holder in the car for the rest of the drive.

  Those shells are now sitting next to me on my writing desk as I write the book. When I get stuck on a sentence or paragraph, I hold them and seek inspiration.

  We made it to Savannah, Georgia, by dark.

  Day Thirty-Two

  This part of the country is familiar to me again. I lived in the South, briefly, on two occasions, and have spent time in Georgia, South Carolina, and Arkansas. I’d never been to Savannah, though, which is one of the crown jewels of Georgia. Like much of the Deep South, it has a lot of old-world charm, immense mansions, and a feeling of history.

  To Dawn, Savannah meant just one thing: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. If you’ve read the book or seen the movie, starring Kevin Spacey and John Cusack, you know the story of a murder that occurred in the Mercer Mansion. Here’s a handy historical tidbit: No one named Mercer ever lived in the Mercer Mansion. You might be able to win a bar bet with that one. Dawn loves the movie, so we made reservations for a tour in the early afternoon.

  Before we got to the Mercer House, we toured the Savannah History Museum. Overall, it’s a pretty typical museum, but there were a couple of displays that caught my eye. One was a full display of old-timey dentist’s equipment. It is the compl
ete office setup of Dr. William Bedford, which he purchased in 1919 for $600 and continued to use, unchanged, for sixty years. He finished his last day with the same equipment he started out using in 1919. I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure there were a few updates in dental technology over those six decades. As I stood staring, I kept thinking of those last patients, and wondering, “Why in the world didn’t they find a different dentist?”

  Another display claimed to be the bench Tom Hanks sat on in the movie Forrest Gump. That would have been pretty cool, but when I read the fine print, I saw that it was just a copy, and that the original bench still belongs to Paramount Pictures. Nothing like going to a museum to see a copy of a pop-culture touchstone.

  The rest of the museum was fine, with lots of Civil War memorabilia, as might be expected. We didn’t want to be late for our date with the Murder … er, Mercer House, so we left and began walking toward it.

  On the way, we came across another piece of history—the site of the Battle of Savannah. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of the players without a scorecard, and the Battle of Savannah is a great example. In 1779, the British were holding Savannah and were intent on keeping it. They built defensible positions around the city called redoubts, each basically a little earthen fort that is relatively easy to defend. On October 9, 1779, the combined forces of American revolutionaries, and French, Haitian, and Irish forces, attacked the redoubts. An hour later, the battle was over, the attacking forces had lost badly, and 800 men were dead. The British continued to hold Savannah and took great cheer from this victory. The Revolutionary War continued for four more years. Now, those redoubts and the historical site sit right in the middle of a heavily trafficked street in Savannah.

  A few minutes later, we arrived at the Mercer House. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is based on the historical case of the killing of Danny Hansford by local art dealer, historic restorer and bon vivant Jim Williams. It was a case complicated by the reputations of Hansford (rumored to be a male prostitute) and Williams, who was very much a part of upper-crust Savannah society. Over the years, there were four trials, and in the end Williams was acquitted.