Heading down to Florida from my home base in New Hampshire is always a shock to the system. The sun, the vast sky, the humidity, the heat, the birds, the tropical vegetation, the wildlife that can eat you.
My Mom lives in Fort Myers so I get the chance to escape to this tropical paradise a few times a year and check out the beaches of Fort Myers, Bonita Beach and Sanibel as well as enjoy swimming in the pool in January, leaving behind the snowblowing back home. But boy of boy can Florida be weird, strange and odd.
There are just so many people down there. So many transplants and such a different climate that seems to bring out the weird, at least from New England standards.
I recently spent a week down in Fort Myers and only caught the local news once but it was cra cra. The first story involved finding a small dog on a leash running loose with injuries near a nature park. Helicopters were scrambled and sure enough, they found a large alligator with the woman’s arm in it’s stomach. No sign of the rest of her.
The next story involved a loose monkey at Home Depot. A good Samaritan noticed the leashed monkey outside the store, grabbed the leash and started to walk the monkey back in to find its owner. Well, when the automatic doors opened the monkey got scared and went berserk and bit the helpful woman six times on the face and back. Yikes!
Then probably the weirdest story of all was about a new strip mall. I don’t know if you’ve seen Southwest Florida but it is basically endless strip malls. Anyway the people interviewed couldn’t wait for another Panera Bread and other restaurants because “we are so busy these days” and did seem to care about any more traffic it would cause because you know “in the season it’s busy anyway”.
As I’m coming back to the forests of New Hampshire, I count my blessings that I live in the middle of “nowhere”, fast food free for the most part and where a traffic jam consists of two cars waiting for the flagman to turn the sign from “stop” to “slow” while they fill in pot holes. I can only take weird in small doses.