I guess we’re starting from the end of the trip.  Or we’re starting with the part of the trip that I have the easiest time writing about.  I don’t know.  Could be a mix.  

I do spend a lot of time with these entries swirling around in my head, usually when I’m waiting for the bus in the morning to work.  Oh, I should add this, I should add that.  It’s A LOT.

Oh no, paragraph three and we haven’t made a point yet.  Herman would have hated this.  Well, ok so here’s my thesis statement if you can call it that.  This entry is going to partially be about my long and difficult relationship with Florida and Orlando in particular, but that is no longer a long and difficult relationship.  Oh and you’ll learn about me crying at Disney World.  Yup.  That happened.  Buckle up my friends.  This is going to be a long one, but I also hope an amusing one.  As always, there will be pictures at the end.  I mean there always are, right?

Oh hi.  Still here???  Ok and now we walk into dark recesses of my mind.  Well, North White Plains, New York in particular.  In the words of my intellectual hero, Sofia Petrillo, Picture it: North White Plains, 1993.

I guess my first real entanglement with Florida, started in 1993.  I was 15 years old and dating my first boyfriend, Cliff Benson.  And hello again Cliff Benson, if you ever happen upon this blog, yes, it’s me a voice from the past.  Yeah, we haven’t seen each other in 30 years.  And hey, I mean I’m doing well.  I’m a professor now.  A bunch of other stuff happened in between, you know ups and downs but I guess that’s the relevant bit.  I hope you are doing well.  No bitterness on my end.

So my little first boyfriend one day in 1993 announces that he is moving to Florida, Orlando in particular.  Since I’m mentioning the guy’s name here and hopefully not embarrassing him, I’m not going to go a lot into the feelings I had around this.  It was really my first sort of brush with Orlando, Florida, other than those commercials for Disney on television.  I still remember the phone number for Disney World — 1-407-W-Dinsey.

Honestly, at that age, Florida was another planet for me.  We’d come from Europe and had gone back there a few times but Florida, for me, that was another planet.  I think for a New Yorker, Florida still is another planet, but it seemed incredibly remote to me at that time.  ESPN used to and probably still does broadcasts competitive high school cheerleading.  As stereotypical as my high school was, we didn’t have people doing the kind of cheerleading they have on that Netflix show Cheer.  On some random Saturday afternoon with nothing much else to do and nowhere to go, I watched one of these cheerleading competitions as a teenager.  Many of the high schools were from Florida.  It was another world to me.

Fast forward fifteen or so years.  I had already been friends with Herman for eight years.  I’d gone through a bit of a hard time in my life.  Around that time, my parents were going on a vacation to Marco Island and I joined.  That might have been the time when I got mesmerized by Florida.  Marco Island was beautiful.  The house we rented was on a bay and we ate breakfast with a view of the water and palm trees.  The house was very white and to me resembled the Barbie dream house.  Interestingly I had stopped taking pictures for a couple of years and was just dipping a toe back into it then.  I had a little digital camera that couldn’t do much, but I did take pictures of Marco Island.

About two months later, Herman asked I wanted to join him on a road trip to Orlando, Florida.  A great American roadtrip.  By then I had gotten a digital SLR and was eager to try it out.  

That roadtrip to Florida marked a sort of turning point for the friendship with Herman.  We traveled for about two weeks and were together all the time.  We drove from Washington DC to Orlando, Florida.  The whole trip was so much fun.  I remember we stopped in North or South Carolina at a Howard Johnson.  Here I am with my New York mindset thinking we’re not going to get this hotel room because the hotel is probably booked solid for the night.  Surprisingly to me, it was not booked solid and the hotel room cost something like $40 a night.  $40.  Even then, that was two sandwiches and a coffee in New York.  Breakfast the next day was equally a shock, price wise.  It was $15 for two of us for a pretty large meal.  

As we drove south, we saw all kinds of weird and funny stuff.  We visited South of the Border in Collins, South Carolina, which is full of these fiberglass statues of alligators and other strange things.  We were driving through Jacksonville, Florida and suddenly the biggest thunderstorm I have ever seen hit.  Really it was horrible.  In front of us, a guy driving a Corvette sped onto the highway and started spinning.  Herman and I had just been talking before that and Herman shut off the radio.  Ok.  We in danger now.  But it was ok and about 10 minutes later, it looked like there hadn’t even been a thunderstorm.

When we got to Orlando though, that’s when the fun really started.  We stayed with Herman’s aunt Sally.  I didn’t know these people at all and honestly, I have no idea what to expect.  Fortunately, we get there and Herman’s aunt could not have been nicer.  That’s when I learned about real hospitality and how family can be people we choose.  We each had our own rooms with our own televisions and bathrooms. I was amazed by this woman who really had no idea who I was and how generous she was with me.

The whole visit was, for lack of a better word, special.  I met two of Herman’s brothers and his sister.  His brother Chris was there because the reason for the visit was a memorial for Herman’s mom, who had passed away a year earlier.  Chris brought his family, including his two year old, who immediately liked me.  He liked me so much that he went to family’s bathroom, got all the shampoo bottles and bathmats and deposited them at my feet.  Chris’s wife goes — he’s courting you, he’s courting you.  Another one of Herman’s aunts said a while later that the Ayayo men need help with their courting skills.  

For years afterwards, Herman and I talked about doing another roadtrip.  We talked about it on and off for years, just as background in our never ending late night conversations about every topic in the entire world.  

Fast forward to 2021.  Things never really worked out time wise for me, when it came to pretty much everything.  My job situation had been pretty precarious for a while, but somehow in 2021, it just started to work out.  I mean that was the thing.  Nothing ever really worked out for me, I felt like.  But then in 2021, it kinda did and Herman and I started planning another great southern road trip.  This one would turn out to be really special.

It was one of those trips where you start out with a plan and then suddenly the plan just goes sideways but in the best way possible.  I mean we could have driven from Washington DC to Orlando without a million stops in between but what fun would that have been?  

The trip started off funny and continued that way.  I decided to be in a DC for a couple of days before it started because I hadn’t been in the city for a while.  It was just at the time when things were returning to something resembling relatively normal.  If you can call the last few years normal.  A lot of places were still closed.  

The most interesting thing I guess you could call it that was that I had this realization that what I had assumed, that my time in Washington was bad, but walking around the city I realized that it wasn’t the bad time I had thought it to be.  I guess I saw the light on it.

Speaking of light or maybe more heat, the other funny thing was that I was not used to that level of heat anymore.  I’m a New Englander, I mean a New Englandah now.  No Rs spoken around here as you well know.  The heat was insane.  My eyeballs were sweating.  Boston gets hot for a couple of days a year, not more than that.  

As we headed towards Florida, we saw some pretty interesting things.  Entering North Carolina, I saw the largest billboard I have ever seen for Donald Trump.  Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on the side of the political spectrum you fall on), I did not have my camera ready to go to photograph it.  We passed through South Carolina and of course stopped at South of the Border, where I got to photograph the neon and weird dinosaurs and alligators there.  Then we stopped in some random place in South Carolina to stay at a Best Western.  Herman said he would have been fine with a $30 a night hotel room that night, but I kinda insisted we stay in a more expensive hotel.  I wanted a door with a lock on it.

The next day we headed towards Charleston.  That was one of the great things about Herman.  He was always up for anything.  I wanted to stop in Charleston to get some pictures of the town.  Herman told me to google the main tourist area in the town to make it easier for us to find it.  I found this area called the Arsenal.  It had to be one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

The range of emotions I felt there were immense.  I am an unabashed history nerd, almost to an extreme.  I felt like I was walking through a movie about the antebellum south.  I looked at the dates on all the houses and imagined what went on inside.  How many human dramas had been acted out in those homes??  How many generations of people had lived in those homes?  I remember music playing or maybe it wasn’t.  I mean this was also the summer after when the world was really waking up after the pandemic.  Going on the road trip was the first thing I did after we’d been locked inside for a year.  I had just gone back to work.  

While walking around the Battery, I took some of my favorite pictures I had ever taken.  

We continued down the road that day until we hit Florida.  In typical Herman fashion, we drove until midnight.  We hit Florida really late.  I kept my arrival a bit of a secret from a dear friend who lives down there with his giant Venezuelan family.  

I stayed at Herman’s dad’s house.  Herman’s mother had unfortunately passed away a few years ago and his father remarried.  His dad though is in bad health and it was a bit sad seeing the house again, as it held so many happy memories from our previous visit.  

The visit also brought us to this funny aspect of our friendship.  We were as close as any married couple, but yet we weren’t married.  Herman was a night owl, as am I and we’d both get our day started at about 10am every day.  10am at the earliest.  AT THE EARLIEST.  I think Herman’s step mother found us both a bit strange.  

The visit to Florida was also wonderful.  My friend Arturo, who I taught over a decade ago now lives down there.  If Herman was my mentor, then I am a bit of the responsible adult with Arturo.  He came to America when he was 16 and has been here for 12 years.  He built a great life in Florida with his family, recently adding dear Marianita to his family.  They live in this multi-generational house in Orlando.  In 2021, Marianita had just been born.  

Arturo hadn’t told his wife that I was arriving and we went to pick her up from church.  She was there with the family and three week old Marianita.  Again emerging from this pandemic year where it was endless bad news, riots, violence and fear, this was a beautiful renewal, the first glimpses of hope after a very trying period for all of us.

We had a lot of memorable great times during that week in Florida but the best night was at a Mexican restaurant with Arturo’s entire family.  Herman joined us and we got to Arturo’s after 1am, where Arturo insisted that the party continue.  Herman and Arturo sat in recliners and we watched a comedy special by Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias.  Herman and Arturo got along like a house on fire.  It was great to watch.

The trip had the usual Herman features.  We visited a wonderful place called Gatorland, a park where the alligators kinda run the place and the people are secondary.  I watched a ranger at Gatorland hold open an alligator’s mouth with his chin and say — the things we do in Florida for minimum wage!!!!!  Later on, after I found out that Herman had passed, I found out that trips to Gatorland were a part of Herman’s “tests.”  “Tests.”  Who doesn’t want to hang out in a park where the average temperature mimicked that of a sauna that is full of hungry animals with hair trigger tempers?  

I was sad leaving Florida.  Being with Arturo is like being in a five ring circus where everything is on fire.  I love the Venezuelan family so much.  I knew I would come back the next year.

Such as it was a road trip,  we had to make stops coming back up.  First stop was Atlanta.  I’m always curious about other places and I want to see new things.  I had never been to Atlanta and wanted to check it out.  Herman had a friend who lives and she very graciously opened her house to us.  Atlanta was good to us.  

But the best, by far the best, part of the trip was the return to Washington.  Herman said we have to see the Peachoid in Gaffney, South Carolina.  What the Peachoid, you ask?  It is a water tower with a giant peach on the top.  We drove and drove and I watched the time of the sunset to make sure the light was good enough to get a good shot of it.  We got there, just as the sun was setting behind the Peachoid.  Not to flex here big time, but I have traveled a lot.  A LOT.  I’ve been to 16 different countries.  I have seen some of the most famous places in the world, but somehow standing in front of that water tower, I felt this thick grass underneath my feet.  There was something special about this moment, standing in front of this thing in the middle of South Carolina.  Maybe it was because I was with Herman.  Maybe this was just a happy moment.  I don’t know.  But it was pretty special.

The even funnier stop was yet to come.  Driving along interstate 85, Herman spotted a billboard for something called the “Sugar Tit Moonshine Distillery.”  Sugar Tit.  I mean genius.  Absolute genius.  Memorable name.  Of course we were stopping there.  Herman was there for the spirits.  I was there for the photos, of course.

To close out the historic 2021 roadtrip, we drove back to DC, arriving at 3:30am.  I had rented a hotel room.  The guy held the room open for me until 3:30am.  I got to the room and even stayed up a little bit longer.  Crazy.  Crazy 24 hours.  

Then the last step of the road trip.  My flight was leaving close to midnight.  I had scheduled it that way to make sure I didn’t miss my flight and so I could make sure I got home that night.  There was a massive rainstorm heading towards Washington then.  Massive.  I’m getting messages from the airline telling me consider re-booking my travel for another day.  But somehow we departed Washington for the 45 minute flight to Boston.  I got to Boston at almost 2am and got home after 3:30am.  What a trip.

Needless to say, I’ve been talking about this trip ever since to such an extent that my mother has told me on many occasions to stop talking about it.  For the next while, Herman and I talked about doing it again, but his dad’s health came in the way of it.  Unfortunately the trip never came to pass.

As I mentioned in previous entries, when I found out Herman had passed, I didn’t know what to do.  I just didn’t know what to do.  Somehow I happened on this idea that I would take a trip.  It was a vast combination of things that made me think of doing this.  I knew Florida would be on the list because it was a place that had meant so much to Herman and to me as well.

I’ll also admit that I wanted to go to Florida to see Arturo and the family.  The relationship I have with Arturo reflects the one I had with Herman.  Herman was 13 years older than me and I’m 19 years older than Arturo.  I tell Arturo the things that Herman told me at almost the same age.  Arturo though to his credit has a lot more support around him than I had at the same age.  I’m not trying to blame my parents here, but I pushed them away when I around Arturo’s age because that’s what I thought you did at that age.  

I started this rather long entry by talking about how the phone number for Disney World would show up on the screen when I was a kid and a teenager.  My parents provided me with everything I needed but going to Florida and going to Disney World was outside of our means.  It didn’t mean I lost the dream of visiting.  I just kept it inside for a long time.  

I had asked Herman on our visits to Florida if it made sense to go to the parks and Herman never really wanted to.  We had enough fun things to do anyway.  On this visit though, I wanted to go to Disney.  Arturo had checked in to the prices of going there and it was too expensive.  As luck would have it, Arturo’s mother arranged for us to be able to go in for free.  

Something about the visit brought a lot of emotion out of me.  I had grown up listening to those Disney songs.  I’m not what they call a Disney adult but like any kind, I loved Disney as a kid.  When I got to be a teenager, I left that all behind, as you do.  For years I pretended I hated Disney and Disney World and had no idea why a person would ever want to go there.  

What utterly shocked me was when I went to Disney World, it was a strangely emotional experience.  I should have titled this entry “Crying at Disney World.”  Why did I get so emotional?  No idea.

There are four immense parks that are a part of Disney World.  I had no idea how big these places were until I actually went there.  I live in New England.  Everything here is tiny.  Europe.  We’re fake Europe here.  We like it small.  

Well Florida does not roll that way.  No.  Build up.  Build out.  If you build it, they will come.  On my last trip to Florida, I saw a hotel that looked like it had come from Italy.  Fifteen minutes from that spot, there’s SeaWorld, where I saw a snowmaker creating little pads of snow for penguins.  

Disney World was for me a dose of culture shock, for lack of a better way of expressing myself.  

We chose Epcot center and Magic Kingdom for our visit.  The day we went to Epcot center, Florida was hit with the back end of a hurricane.  Just another day at the office for Florida, Arturo reassured me.  The visit to Epcot center started in a very typical way.  We got plastic ponchos from CVS with cartoon characters on them.  We drove to Epcot center in a huge rainstorm and ran into the entry through a driveway with about six inches of water.  Arturo assured me that going to an amusement park in a huge rainstorm is a huge Florida rite of passage.  

As corny as this is going to sound, and it’s plenty corny, but when we passed into the park, it was the realization of a dream.  Arturo and Juliana didn’t realize this.  I felt like a kid again.  The feeling of what I watched E.T. for the first time somehow came back to me.  

Oh and let’s get to the crying.  I guess this is the big moment in the blog entry.  No matter who you are, how old you are or where you come from, the main street USA view at Disney World is iconic.  I guess you can act jaded or whatever when you get there, but this didn’t really work for me.  I saw the Disney castle and immediately started crying.  Uncontrollably.  I could not stop crying.  I’ve talked to friends afterwards about this and one of them told me that I’m in mourning, so it was natural.

The magic kingdom was in fact, magical.  Some things don’t live up to the hype.  Much as my sarcastic teenage self would cringe at hearing this, it was a really magical visit.  

So finally, some pictures: