It seems that whenever we think of Florida and travel, beaches and theme parks come to mind. True, there are a bunch of them in the sunshine state. Also true is that Florida offers one of the best places for a good road trip in the country. Year-round mild weather and a well-kept highway system can take travelers to an interesting variety of places at a leisurely pace.
A first stop when considering a Florida road trip should be America’s Byways, a website that offers good planning resources, suggested day-trip routes and background information on a variety of possible road trips.
In Florida, it’s hard not to run into something interesting to see by just heading out in any given direction. Here we have 10 of probably hundreds of possibilities for Florida road trips that do not include theme parks.
Gulfside Highway 19– Homosassa, Florida
On the west coast, start at Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park to see West Indian Manatees, black bears, bobcats and gators. Continue north to the city of Crystal River to swim with Manatees or just have lunch. End the day in Cedar Key, an island known far and wide for seafood. Better yet, do it this month and check out the 43rd Annual Cedar Key Seafood Festival, Saturday Oct 20, and Sunday, Oct 21, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Tamiami Trail -Tampa
Explore the natural splendor of the Everglades between Tampa with Miami with a drive across the Tamiami Trail, a highway time machine of sorts that passes through a primeval forest with toothy animals as well as canyons of strip-malls and heart-stopping traffic. The 275-mile trail is part of highway US 41, and connects Tampa with Miami.
Florida Natural’s Grove House- Lake Wales
A visit to the Sunshine State wouldn’t be complete without a taste of Florida’s Natural brand orange juice. The company’s Lake Wales grove in central Florida offers a private glimpse of its juice making and provides a history lesson for the kids in the guise of a fun stop.
Black Bear Scenic Byway
The Florida Black Bear Scenic Byway goes through one of Florida’s most distinctive ecosystems, known as the Big Scrub. The 60-mile corridor along SR 40 serves as the backbone for a network of scenic roads and interpretive trails that include the Ocala National Forest, Lake George State Forest, Heart Island Conservation Area and Tiger Bay State Forest. The Florida black bear is at its highest population density here, so look out for them!
Indian River Lagoon Scenic Highway- Merritt Island
Indian River Lagoon National Scenic Highway is an estuary that provides habitat to more species than anywhere in North America. The 166-mile loop along Florida’s Space Coast starts at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and draws history buffs, bird watchers, anglers, surfers, swimmers, boaters and vacationers
Old Florida Heritage Highway– Gainesville
The Old Florida Heritage Highway goes along countryside, lakes, wetlands, prairies and rural homesteads. Scenic U.S. 441 takes travelers back in time as a good example of one of the more well preserved sections of the Florida Highway as it was before the interstates came along.
The Florida Keys– Key West
The 113-mile (181-kilometer) drive on Highway 1 from mainland Florida to Key West has route-tidal flats and teal waters dotted by distant islands as you drive over the ocean. Highway 1’s concrete stretches across with the Atlantic spreading out to the left, the Gulf to the right.
Ormond Scenic Loop and Trail– Ormond Beach
The Ormond Scenic Loop and Trail is a loop of roadways with quick access to the Atlantic Ocean and North Peninsula along with several state and public parks. Museums and historic public buildings and homes can be found in Tomoka State Park. Recreational opportunities include parks and trails offering boating, fishing, hiking, swimming, bicycling or just a walk on the beach.
A1A Scenic & Historic Coastal Byway- St Augustine
A drive up or down A1A takes travelers between the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway on a narrow barrier island with breath-taking views. Along the way, see a variety of wildlife including 50 endangered species. Stop in St. Augustine, the oldest continually occupied European settlement in the United States.
Want to know more about Florida Road Trips? Freddy and Kendra Holliday from TV’s “The Amazing Race” have a show of their own, aptly called “Florida Road Trips,” featuring fast-paced excursions to intriguing, historic and natural must-see attractions around the state.
The little city of Española lies just 25 miles north of Santa Fe. It sits on the crossroads of SR 68 and NM 76 (aka the Taos Highway), which leads to the village of Chimayo, famed for its handwoven blankets, Santuario, and chiles. Española is also surrounded by some of the region’s famous Indian pueblos. Until about five years ago, I never saw any reason whatsoever to stop there, aside from filling up my gas tank. When you’re a dusty town located between some of a state’s biggest tourist attractions, you tend to get overlooked.
It’s my obsession with New Mexican cuisine – and posole (a dried hominy soup) in particular – that led the owner of a Santa Fe street food cart to tell me about El Paragua. I can’t recall our conversation, but he basically told me if I wanted to taste some of the best food in New Mexico, I should hightail it up to Española.
So that’s what I did. I pulled up to a large, imposing hacienda constructed from massive blocks of hand-hewn stone, located all by its lonesome on the corner of NM 76 and Highways 84/285. Inside, it was dimly lit, all rustic wooden beams, (vigas), terra-cotta floor tiles, and those same stone walls. El Paragua looked like an old-school Mexican restaurant and to a certain degree, that’s what it is.
El Paragua started out as a roadside food stand in 1958. Brothers Larry and Pete Atencio, the sons of plumber Luis Atencio, decided they were going to sell their mother Frances’ tacos and tamales. They added a table, and opened for business. Luis provided the boys with a multi-colored beach umbrella (paraguay) for shade, and El Paragua was born.
In 1966, the Atencio family converted their tack room into a restaurant, and continued to add expansions over the years (including converting Luis’ plumbing shop). Today, El Paragua is legendary for both the quality of the food (the Atencio’s are still actively involved in the daily operations, and use Frances’ recipes) and the service, which is unfailingly warm and friendly.
Let’s get to the important stuff, shall we? Never have I tasted posole or carneadovada that comes even close to touching El Paragua’s. Every dish is an explosion of flavor. The posole is a rich, well-seasoned, porky broth brimming with hunks of fork-tender meat, chewy morsels of hominy, and a goodly amount of chile (I prefer mine Christmas); eat it with greaseless puffs of sopapilla drizzled with honey. The fiery adovada sauce is brick-red and earthy, the pork succulent. The plate comes with a side of whole frijoles mixed with chicos (smoky bits of dried, then cooked, corn). The tortillas are made in-house. If you’re in a hurry, there’s also the parking lot taco-stand, El Parasol, a tribute to the original El Paragua. What’s not to love about quarts of green chile to go?
I now plan my New Mexico visits around El Paragua, to maximize the number of meals I can have there. If food is love, then El Paragua is a long-distance relationship worth staying in.
Conventional wisdom dictates that there are two ways to become an ambassador in the United States: become a friend or big-time donor of the President or work your way up through the ranks of the Foreign Service by not stepping on too many toes. But there are a handful of current and former ambassadors that aren’t always very diplomatic, and Ambassador Ed Peck is right at the top of that list.
I met Ambassador Peck in 2002, when he gave a lecture to a class I was in about the importance of dissent in the Foreign Service. I was impressed by how passionate and outspoken he was and more than a little surprised the State Department invited him to speak to us. The Hollywood native retired in 1989 after 37 years of government service, five years in the military and 32 years in the Foreign Service.
Peck served as the U.S. Ambassador to Mauritania, the Chief of Mission in Baghdad before we had an ambassador there, and deputy director of the White House Task Force on Terrorism, among many other jobs. His overseas assignments also included stints in Sweden, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. He’s made a habit of speaking his mind and often says things that people don’t want to hear.Peck thinks that terrorists hate America because of what we’ve done, not who we are. And Peck, who is Jewish, has been an outspoken critic of Israeli conduct in the Occupied Territories. Peck now serves as a media commentator, runs a consulting business called Foreign Services International and occasionally dips his feet back into politics – in 2010, he was part of an aid flotilla that tried to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
We caught up with Ambassador Peck recently to ask him how American can bolster its image in the Middle East, how the Foreign Service has changed over the years and what makes a good Ambassador.
You joined the Foreign Service in 1957. What was your motivation?
In my junior year at UCLA, I was chosen to go on Project India, which sort of planted the seeds for the Peace Corps. We spent the summer of ’55 traveling all over India by bus and train to play basketball and volleyball and speak to students, argue, explain, drink lots of tea and participate in the building of dispensaries.
That trip changed my life. I came back and changed my major from forestry to business administration and decided I wanted to join the Foreign Service.
What was the selection process like in those days?
It was a one-day exam at that time. It had long been a three-day exam given only in Washington, D.C., and everyone traveled and stayed at their own expense. And at that time, if you got in, you had to pay to ship your own effects overseas and for your housing. So because of that financial proposition, the Foreign Service consisted of moneyed New England aristocracy. It was a group of snots basically.
By the time I came along, it was a one-day test given all around the world and shipping and housing were paid for. That’s how you got a bunch of peasants like me – people with no roman numerals after their names, born of immigrant parents and without family money. So I embarked on this career and enjoyed it enormously the whole time. Not every minute of every day, not every single boss I had but living and working overseas was, to me, a genuine reward even if it was unpleasant or unsafe or unhealthy or not very exciting.
And where did they send you?
When I first came into the Foreign Service, there was no bidding, you were just assigned to places. My first post was the Consulate General in Gothenburg, Sweden, which is no longer there and then I went to Tangier to learn Arabic, six hours a day, five days a week for 22 months. Then we spent two years in Tunis and in ’66 we went to Oran, Algeria. I was the principal officer of a four-person outpost consulate.
There were no other Americans for 300 miles in any direction. We were all by ourselves out there. They told me, ‘the reason you’re out there Ed, is if one day you don’t answer the phone, we’ll know Morocco has invaded.’
During the Six Days War in ’67, we had nine demonstrations against the consulate in the first five days of that war, which was, I’m told, a world record at that time. They never got in, it never became violent, but it scared the crap out of us.
Did they evacuate you?
Everyone else was evacuated on day five except me. I got into the consulate car, leaving everything else behind and drove through nine Algerian roadblocks to get to the embassy in Algiers, where diplomatic relations had been broken and what was left was known as an Interests Section, under the Swiss flag. All the dependents plus most of the employees were gone. Two months, my family rejoined me in Algiers, and four months later, I reopened the consulate in Oran and flew the only American flag in Algeria since consular relations had not been broken.
It was the only one-person post in the world and finally they hired my wife to act as my admin assistant, which was probably against regulations. We were there for roughly a year.
What was the starting salary when you joined?
I can tell you exactly what I was paid then: $5,200, a good salary. A condominium we own in D.C. now rents, monthly, for exactly that amount.
I worked for the Mobil oil company after graduation but I got fired for doing many of the things that got me into trouble at the State Department: telling people what I thought. Then I worked for Shell and quit to join the Foreign Service. I think I took a $400 pay cut to join. We rented a nice big one-bedroom apartment in Arlington, Virginia, for $75 per month.
You were in the Foreign Service for 32 years and the military for five. How do you compare them?
There are similarities. You’re on duty 24 hours a day. You go where they send you and you do what they tell you to do. Those are the similarities. There is a much higher esprit de corps in the military. The Foreign Service is a very low-key organization. Very few people have any idea what the Foreign Service is or what it does. Some think it has something to do with the French Foreign Legion.
The only time any attention is paid to us is when there’s a catastrophe overseas, like the killing in Libya. Otherwise, Americans really don’t care very much, as long as other countries do things the way we want them to.
Also, unlike the military, the Foreign Service has no political clout like the military does. We’re impecunious, we have no political clout or domestic constituency, we have no uniforms and no one knows what we’re doing out in Bunga-Dunga or Puerto Banana or wherever the hell we are.
You don’t usually become an Ambassador by pissing people off though, do you?
I won a dissent award as a middle grade officer, and years later I did a study for The American Foreign Service Association. It turns out that people in the middle grades were more likely to be promoted if they had won a dissent award. And those who went on to become Ambassadors were much more likely to have won a dissent award. So if you do it the right way, persistently and with a sense of humor it doesn’t hurt you. But people knew that if I went to work for them, I’d tell them what I thought.
You spent most of your career in the Middle East. How do you improve our image in the Arab World?
We’ve repaired our ties with Germany and Japan so it can be done. People say Arabs and Jews have never lived in peace together. That is absolute horse crap. How would your relationship with your next-door neighbor change if you woke up one morning and found they’d moved their fence onto your property? If they dug up some plants and trees while doing it? Or especially if they moved their fence all the way to the next house and pushed you out.
And the President is extremely limited in what he can do, because he’s beholden to what his party thinks need to be done in order for him to be re-elected. So he’s not going to do anything to offend Israel because there is a very dedicated, powerful lobby. We like to tell people our way isn’t just the right way; it’s the only way. It’s called American exceptionalism. But by definition, you can’t impose democracy. It isn’t going to work.
I was asked by the BBC about the $1 billion American Embassy in Baghdad and I told them, ‘It’s not an Embassy, it’s a fortress, you can’t walk down to the market, you have to go in an armored car with helicopter gunships flying overhead.’ That’s not the Foreign Service I knew.
But you want the place you work to be safe, do you not? We’ve just had several embassies and consulates attacked around the world and the terrorism threat has magnified in a big way since your career ended.
We brought this on ourselves. The Swedish embassy doesn’t have to move. The Australian embassy doesn’t have to be boarded up and placed behind barbed wire. We brought this onto ourselves in terms of our relations with other countries by our own behavior. It’s focused in the Middle East because there we are violating all of our founding principles every day. Don’t we stand for freedom, justice and liberty all around the world? No. Only in some places.
Gaddafi had to go because he killed almost 1,000 Libyans who were engaged in an armed uprising to overthrow him, so he had to go. Netanyahu killed 1,400 Gazans in Gaza who weren’t armed and weren’t engaged in an armed uprising to overthrow his government and he used American guns, bombs, bullets, rockets, planes, napalm and white phosphorus bombs. But that’s OK isn’t it?
Let’s be clear. No one in his or her right mind, and there are people who will not qualify for inclusion, wants anything bad to happen to anyone in the Middle East. Not one Israeli, or Palestinian or American, or anyone else. But terrible things have, are and, I fear, will happen to all those groups unless and until the Occupation ends, and Palestinians live in peace and security with Israel as their neighbor.
Hold on, we can debate why there are threats out there against us, but the reality is that there is danger in representing the U.S. overseas. Don’t our diplomats deserve to be in secure facilities?
You can never permit a designer or architect to make decisions. Security people are trained to focus far more on security than on operational effectiveness, it’s all just security for security’s sake.
What did you love about the Foreign Service?
Travel, learning, listening, informing and explaining. I would go back in the Foreign Service tomorrow if they’d have me. I loved it; I treasured it. I thought it was an honorable job and I recommend that people join but it’s not the same Foreign Service life that I lived.
London is built on layers of its own past. Occasionally they poke through to the present, like the old Roman walls and the Temple of Mithras. Now two current construction projects have revealed glimpses of the city’s previous epochs.
Work to build a leisure center at Elephant and Castle has uncovered some 500 medieval skeletons, the London Evening Standard reports. They were interred in 25 crypts. It appears they were relocated into the crypts in 1875 to accommodate a widening of the road but date as far back as the early 14th century. Now new construction dictates they’ll have to be reinterred again. Not even the dead get to rest long in London!
Another project creating a new tunnel for Crossrail at Plumstead has uncovered a much older transport system, the BBC reports. Archaeologists believe timbers they’ve discovered at the site are part of a 3,500-year-old Bronze Age trackway.
These wooden roads were used to ease travel across rough areas, especially wetlands. Similar trackways have been found in many locations in the UK and continental Europe. The odd thing about this one is that it runs along the same route as the new Crossrail route.
One great place to explore London’s history is the Museum of London. The British Museum has good galleries about prehistoric, Roman and Medieval England. The Crossrail Visitor Information Centre also has an archaeology exhibit until October 27 showing off some of their discoveries. The finds range from the prehistoric to the Industrial Revolution, although these latest finds are still being analyzed and will not be on display.
[Image of 15th century funeral procession at the Old St. Paul’s cathedral courtesy Project Gutenberg]
Uppsala University in Sweden is 535 years old today, having been inaugurated on this date in 1477. As one of the older universities in Europe, it has quite a few sights to see and is located in a town of ancient importance.
The city started as a religious center for the pagan Vikings and the location of their Thing, a general assembly. An ancient temple at Uppsala was said to have had statues to Thor, Odin, and Freyr and the entire building was encircled by a golden chain hanging from the gables. While the old temple has disappeared, there are still some Viking remains in the form of runestones and three large earthen mounds. Legend has it that they’re the barrows (tombs) of the three principal Norse gods, but excavations showed them to be the resting places for three early Norse rulers.
As with many pagan sites across Europe, Uppsala was turned into a center for Christianity and became the site for the country’s first archbishopric in 1164. There’s a little medieval church dating to the 13th century and a much more elegant cathedral from the 15th century. I wish I could describe the interior of the earlier church to you, but on my visit I walked in on a wailing baby getting baptized and had to walk right out! Such are the hazards of travel.
The later house of worship still serves as the cathedral today. Its brick exterior has a warm, homey feel, but when you go inside you find the soaring arches and fine stonework that you’d expect from a European cathedral. Inside you can find the tombs of important Swedes such a King Gustav Vasa (of Vasa ship fame), scientist Carl Linnaeus and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.
As for the university itself, such an old center of learning is bound to have some attractions. In good weather visit the Linnaean Garden, a beautiful botanical garden founded in 1655 and reorganized by Carl Linnaeus, who created the taxonomic system still used to categorize plants and animals today. He got in trouble with church authorities for categorizing humans as primates. Above is a view of the gardens courtesy Andreas Trepte, who caught them on one of those warm, sunny days that are so precious this far north. The gardens are an easy stroll from Uppsala Castle, complete with throne room and a rich collection of European art.
%Gallery-167737%The Gustavianum, formerly an operating theater where 17th century medical students could watch dissections, is now a museum showing off the university’s art and archaeological collections. There’s also a cool exhibit of early scientific instruments. The old operating theater still exists if you want to see what it was like to get cut up in public.
Take some time to soak up Uppsala’s atmosphere. Stroll through the narrow medieval lanes and along the riverside where the students like to lounge. Being a northern city, it changes dramatically with the seasons. My first visit was in winter and was in fact my favorite. Standing atop an old Viking barrow and looking out across the snow-covered fields as the church spire rose in the gray distance, I felt like I was seeing Sweden at its best. Sure, we all like sunshine, but biting cold wind and short, overcast days seemed more properly Scandinavian!
Uppsala makes an easy day trip from Stockholm and is one of the top places to see in Sweden. Gamla Uppsala (“Old Uppsala”) with its pagan remains and early church, is just outside the more modern town.
