just lurking?

lurker goes to florida

Ok this is the story and I'm sticking to it. After a lot of telephone and email planning for the longest trip of my life, we all met up in DeMotte, Indiana on Tuesday (12/28/99). Gwen had missed her plane from KC to Chicago the night before and had to take a much later one on standby. Joe(my son), Megan(his gf), Gwen(our friend from kc), Chris, Jennifer, Jason and Sarah spent the night at Megan's house and got to bed late so they were all tired after the drive to DeMotte. The night before, I had packed the rooftop carrier that Joe had borrowed but because it wouldn't fit right. I left it in the garage to be installed with everyone help lifting it up in the morning. Cold and snowy we lifted it onto the top of the van and as soon as we started strapping it on the luggage rack broke off from the pressure. Everything in the carrier then had to be repacked into the van and small rental ford we were taking. Chris realized he had forgotten his tent. We finally left midmorning. There was a strong crosswind on I 65 through Indiana making driving, especially in the van, tiring. The trip though was pretty uneventful, we crossed Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee making only gas stops (there must be mountains in Kentucky and Tennessee as my ears popped quite a bit and there were some really steep downhills that kind of scared me but it was too dark to see). In northern Georgia we stopped at a Kmart and Chris bought a tent and we got food to go at Wendy's. Also got a good supply of condiments and plastic tableware! Gwen took over driving the van at this stop too. I was worried about Gwen driving the van because it is built for a taller person (I never worry about Gwen's driving, she is one of the best and safest drivers I know). I was worried that she would be terribly uncomfortable and tire quickly, but after a few miles she got used to it and drove all the way across Georgia and into Florida (that's a really long stretch, I slept most of the way. Joe took over driving in northern Florida, it was night and cool out but not bitter cold there. I went right back to sleep until daylight and Joe had made pretty good time across Florida. The weather and everything else was beautiful! Everything was green and flowering and the sky was blue. The parking lots and everything else were really clean. We were driving around town in t shirts with the windows down. In Naples we went shopping for all the things we would need in the way of food and drink for eight people for at least five days so it got pretty crowded in the vehicles. Gwen was wonderful and washed the salt off the van, that really please me as it was covered. We got food to go in sight of the toll booths on 75 where it turns into Alligator Alley. The lines to the toll were stopped dead and backed up onto the ramps. We got through pretty quickly though (at the time we weren't sure if the line to the venue was backed up this far (42 miles) already. Right after the toll booths traffic thinned out and we were able to travel at 70 mph and stopped at the rest area and took pictures of us with the palm trees. Alligator Alley is a typical looking interstate but very flat and has a chain link fence separating the road from the everglades. There is a canal just outside the fence and the canals on either side of the road connect every few miles under the road. We could see an alligator in the canals occasionally. The vegetation along the way was also strange, I couldn't identify any of the trees or bushes. Maybe five miles short of the Big Cypress exit both lanes of traffic came to a dead stop. Police drove in the median and told those of us going to the concert to get into the right lane (hard to do when you're stopped and both lanes are full, but as traffic inched along the concert traffic did get over) so the through traffic could get through. When we were all over to the right lane we started getting off the road onto the paved shoulder so the interstate was two lanes again. Of course we were mostly stopped and when we did move it was only a couple of feet so there was plenty of time to look around. We finally came to a bridge over a canal and were able to see quite a few alligators up close. At that point I noticed a really big fossil in the rocks and picked it up and saw that it was too big to take along so I started dropping it onto another big rock to break it into a manageable piece. Some ants got all over my hands and arms as I was doing this and real soon I felt a lot of stinging bites. I guess they were fire ants and had maybe twenty painful bites. Gwen put some stuff on the bites right away and all but two of them stopped stinging (those two are still swelled up at this writing a week later). Traffic moved slowly but steadily and after an hour or so we could see the exit. People were coming from the ocean side of Florida too so as their line met our line we had to merge into one line to travel the last twelve miles. We were stopped for long periods of time on this road too. It was a paved two lane road that zigzagged right then left then right for the whole rest of the distance and it also had canals on each side but there was no fence. We spent over four hours on this road and the party really started here, with everybody playing music and starting drinking etc. but of course there were no toilets along the way and I kept wondering if I'd see somebody bit by an alligator when they went to the canal to pee. Nobody did that I saw anyway. Finally we got to security where the road widened from one lane to maybe eight and everyone was stopped and the vehicles searched for fireworks, firearms, people with vendor stuff who weren't vendors and of course people without tickets hiding out. Then eight lines back into one but it went well, we knew we were getting close. Two or three miles further and we were turned off the road and onto a gravel one lane and then onto grass. People directed every move and soon we were parked headed into a ditch with room behind the vehicles to camp. The row in back of us was parked so closely though that there was no way to move from here till the concert was over. It would get dark very soon so we hurried to set up the tents. Everything went well and soon we were cooking, something that seemed to go on throughout our stay. And we had some really great meals! It turned out we were camped only about a five minute walk from the venue and even closer was water and toilets. After having some beers we started to check stuff out. There was a place we called the White City because of the tall building facades that were painted all white. There were workmen welding a huge metal thing together there that looked like a compass needle. On the back side of White City the facades were painted to look more like buildings and there was a boardwalk there. The boardwalk was along a canal and one way was the shopping area and the other way down the boardwalk led into the Red Light District. The Red Light District was the only place we were allowed to actually go into a cypress forest and they had thoughtfully provided huge red spotlights through the whole place to give it an eerie red glow at night. Every time I visited Red Light there was a drum circle, which gave the whole place an even weirder feeling with the sound of drums and everybody dancing in the red glow. Phish did a sound check that night but I don't think the venue was opened (I didn't go to the venue as I could hear well from where I was. I think they played three songs but the only one I knew was Quinn the Eskimo. Back at the camp I met our neighbors. We spent a lot of time with Edward and Wendy and Wes while there. They are from New Orleans and we made loose plans to meet them for Mardi Gras. I made several more trips around the area before I went to bed and I was sure this was the best party I had ever been to. The next day and in fact the rest of our time there was going to the venue to see Phish or just hanging out. The new years eve show was of course the biggest with fantastic fireworks and everything. They played from just before midnight till well after sunrise. Some people tried to get in line to leave then but the line out was probably 24 hours long at that time. We just stayed camped for another day. When we left we drove up to Sarasota and went to the beach. I had never seen the gulf before. The weather was perfect(as it was the whole trip) and we found a lot of shells and stuff. We ate In Sarasota and started the trip home, it seemed like a much longer drive home as everybody was pretty tired. We made it though back to DeMotte and everyone unpacked their stuff from the van into their cars. The transmission in the van broke down just before we got there and I stayed a couple of extra days while it was being repaired and then drove home to Kansas on an uneventful trip.

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