Destination: United States East Coast Intracoastal Waterway

Book: Gib’s Odyssey: A Tale of Faith and Hope on the Intracoastal Waterway (NEW: May, 2011) by Walter G. Bradley

Since I have never owned a boat, I don’t generally go looking for the equivalent of a road trip by boat. Therefore, I am not familiar with all the routes that obsess people who own those “Holes in the water you throw money into” as William Buckley described his passion for sail boats. Therefore, Gib’s Odyssey acquainted me with a United States trip that I knew absolutely nothing about.

A helpful map at the beginning of the book shows the route from Key West to New York City that Gib Peters followed in his 29-foot motor boat, Ka-Ching. Author Walter G. Bradley explains the history of the Intracoastal Waterway early in the book.  From Colonial times, sailors looked for routes hugging the coast, protected from the Atlantic by barrier islands. Although an inland water route from Boston to Georgia was proposed in 1808, it was attacked piecemeal in the following 150 years. During World War II, the need for protected routes up the East coast became essential and the entire route got more attention.

Gib Peter's boat, Ka-Ching

The Ka-Ching, twenty years old, needed a lot of work, but Gib Peters always enjoyed a challenge. And as the book reveals, he was endlessly creative. He had to be, because this was not just an ordinary travel adveture. He undertook this epic voyage as a challenge to ALS, Lou Gehrigs’ disease, a relentless killer.

Among other skills, Gib was a writer, and his e-mails to friends and family, some of which became columns in the Key West Citizen newspaper, enliven what could be a depressing story of decline. The man’s sense of humor never failed–even when his voice failed him, first his arms and then his legs lost strength, and his two “deckhands”, kittens he adopted for the voyage caused him annoyance and concern–he reported every bit of the trip with self-deprecating laughs.

You learn at the beginning of the book about his diagnosis and reaction to the nearly sure fate of a person with this relentless disease. You also know that he does not survive to write the book, because it is authored by his physician, Walter G. Bradley. And despite my general avoidance of the self-discovery memoirs of people with fatal diseases (sorry, but I’m just being honest–I duck when the going gets rough), I enjoyed nearly everything about this travel book.

Because it IS a travel book. It lets us know mile by mile what it is like to travel up the Intracoastal Waterway. It had me searching for companies that do the trip as a cruise (see below)–seeing as how I would never in a thousand years be as resourceful as Gib at fixing all the little things that can go wrong aboard a boat.  However, if you are the sort to travel in your own boat,  you can find plenty of help and Intracoastal Waterway maps on line. It had me looking at the map and thinking about the southern states I have missed on my quest to visit all 50 states.

And yes, it had me thinking of the larger voyage he wrote about–his long-long thoughts about life and death.

Trip Planning:

Since I have not been on an ICW cruise myself, the following are not recommendations, just a sampling of the variety of possibilities. Numerous companies offer short versions of cruises–even one or two days anywhere from the Chesapeake Bay area to bits of the Southern coastline. I was interested in what the longest possible tours were and how much they would cost.

A charter yacht for four people from Florida Keys to the Chesapeake Bay. Sixteen days, $16,000 for the whole experience, including breakfast and lunch. Aboard The Tireless. (There’s also an eight-day option.)

15 Days Jacksonville FL to Rhode Island or vice versa on a 100-passenger ship.  Blount Small Ship Adventures. (Shorter trips also available). Starts at $4,589 per person.

This book was sent to me by the publisher so that I would review it. The photo of Ka Ching above comes from the Miami Herald web page, and you can click on it to read their review. I have included links to Amazon for your convenience, and keep in mind that if you follow any link and buy anything at all, A Traveler’s Library gets a few cents, and you get our gratitude.

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Heron in Everglades

Destination: Florida

Book: Nature Girl, 2006, by Carl Hiaasen

I have a lot of serious, thoughtful books in my travel library. Carl Hiassen didn’t write any of them.

Hiassen’s books, like Nature Girl, are fun, quick reads with delightfully over-the-top characters. Oh, they do have  themes satirizing contemporary political foibles. One gets the feeling that Hiassen, a reporter and article writer, can let his opinions flow more easily in fiction about news items he might have covered as a journalist.

Quoting his web site biography:

Tourist Season, published in 1986, was Hiaasen’s first solo novel. GQ magazine called it “one of the 10 best destination reads of all time,” although it failed to frighten a single tourist away from Florida, as Hiaasen had hoped it might.

Sounds like I should be talking about that one, but frankly, I ran out of time to read another of Hiassen’s gems, so am reporting on a book that Ken and I chose to listen to in the car on a long trip a couple of years ago. (I checked Nature Girl out of the library to check details, because, frankly, Hiaasen’s novels don’t stick with you any longer than cotton candy.)

However, I do know that the book kept us giggling, and I’m not even going to try to tell you about the plot and multitude of subplots.  Well, all right, since you insist, the “girl” of the title plots to get even with telephone solicitors by taking one of them out into the wilds of Florida. She heads for Dismal Key with a couple of bizarre characters following her. There her little party (the phone solicitor guy and his girlfriend) run into a Seminole Indian who is trying to live in nature. That’s most of the entanglements, but you’re own your own to try to untangle them.

The book takes place in the 10,000 Islands area lying just outside the Everglades National Park, which is swampy and jungly and scary to most people. We visited the Everglades and found the area endlessly fascinating, except that the mosquitos came in such huge swarms that we had to run from car to motel room and then crank the AC down at night so the little menaces would fall asleep before we did.

Another recommended Florida mystery writer, Randy Wayne White wrote Sanibel Island, which I read while in Florida on my first visit several years ago.We had visited the delightful west coast of Florida, and loved Sanibel Island, so I grabbed his book. He focuses on the problems of over-development, and his characters are not quite as wacky as Hiassen’s. Between White and Hiassen you can travel all over Florida without actually setting foot in the state, although I’m not recommending that.

The Music Road Trip has a couple of suggestions for music from the non-touristy parts of Florida today, Jeanie Fitchen and Del Suggs for your listening pleasure on the road trip.

A previous post about Florida talked about the grand hotel built by a railroad magnate in Tampa.Two other Florida writers I like: Ernest Hemingway (he had a house in Key West which you still can visit) or Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road about growing up in Florida and collected folk tales from people in her small town. You can read both in the American Library edition that I talked about earlier.

Photo from Flickr with Creative Commons License. Please click on the photo to see more about the photographer.  I have included a link to Nature Girl so you can buy it at Amazon.  Every purchase helps keep A Traveler’s Library going. Would you believe 109 clicks went to Amazon from my site this month and nobody bought anything?Hmmmm…..

What have you read about Florida? And I’m looking for recommendations for Arkansas and Illinois, if you’d like to play along.

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On Tuesday, I borrow the phrase Travel Tuesday from Twitter, put down my books and talk about my own travels.

Henry B. Plant Museum

Destination: Tampa, Florida

Attraction: The Tampa Bay Hotel

I have a very bad habit of accumulating stuff.  I don’t just accumulate it–I have to have it where I can see it–preferably reach it at a moment’s notice–because if I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t have it, now would I?

But I don’t  come within a mile-long, terrazzo-tiled , gilded woodwork hallway packed with furniture of those dudes in the Gilded Age. Not only did they stuff their places with stuff, but the stuff was all curlicues and fringes, and inlays and embroidery and painted scenes, and plaques made of woven hair.

I tend to wander around establishments of that era with my mouth hanging open, wanting to ask the original owners, “What WERE you thinking?”

That was my experience at The Tampa Bay Hotel, a railroad resort that Henry Plant, the “King of Florida” built. If it weren’t for Plant, Florida might never have become the tourist magnet that it is today.   Plant made his money from the railroads and steamships, but had to create somewhere for people to GO on those trains and boats, so he built hotels. The rail line runs right by the back  door of the Tampa Bay Hotel and the steamships could pull up close by.

Outside, the hotel stretches for a city block along the water front, corners adorned with minarets and a casino* topped by a dome with the same pointy top as the minarets. The Ottoman look reflects people’s image of Florida in the late 19th century–exotic.

*Casino was a place for performances, kind of a cross between the Roman Coliseum and a theater. It was not a gambling establishment.

Incidentally, before you get any ideas, you cannot stay there any more. Part of it is restored and furnished as it was during the golden days, so that you can ooh and ahh your way through a guided tour of the Henry B. Plant Museum. The rest is used by a college. Good, practical arrangement. One suspects that Henry would approve.

Inside, the style is kind of a “you name it” basketful of French, Egyptian, Greek,  Renaissance–41 trainloads of decor, according to the brochure.  I was with a group of travel writers, and we were hustled through the rooms before we could get explanations. Yes, I can recognize a chair and a table, but the designers of the day spent their time dreaming up unique visual gems that take some explaining 100 years later.

Still, I can see myself swishing into the Writing and Reading Room in my long white gauzy cotton skirt, to sit at the tables in a room flooded with light, and writing “Wish you were here,” to all my envious friends who could not be in this exotic place.  And perhaps I would be fortunate enough to be ensconced in one of the tower rooms with cross ventilation of ocean breezes, where I could hear the clacking of the leaves of palm trees outside. I might not have been able to afford it, though. This luxury suite cost $15 a night!

You can get visitor information at the Henry Plant museum’s web site.

Do you like the style of the gilded age, with its trainloads of tchotchkes?

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