Ft. Myers, FL~

***Edit: After a number of concerned phone calls and a couple of e-mails I find it necessary to include the following disclaimer: The photos in the gallery below were taken with a powerful zoom lens from an observation deck at least a story above the subjects being photographed. The photographer (read: me) was never in any danger. We now return you to your regularly scheduled entry.***

I lived in Florida very briefly back in 1998, in the Sarasota area, and had such a negative experience that I actually met with a fairly high level of anxiety the first time I traveled back through on our first tour together a few years ago. My experiences these last few years have thankfully been completely the opposite, given the acquaintances of fabulous people and excursions into very different parts of the state. One thing that hasn’t changed at all in my working memory, and of which I am growing more and more fond, is the distinctly different wildlife here.

I can look up and see ibis on the telephone lines and parakeets grazing in the grass. There are Great Herons, blue and white, standing at roadside as if waiting for the bus and flying overhead close enough for me to distinguish their different flight feathers. Anoles are absolutely everywhere, alternately green or brown, swift to dart into a safe crevice if a shadow looms. I even watched an ornate box turtle wander directly through our campground one afternoon, just like she owned the place. I took her out to the woods in back and set her down, well away from the pickup trucks that typically raced through the campground. But it simply wouldn’t be Florida without the one quintessential reptilian citizen I wished to see more than anything else, out in its natural habitat.

I of course speak of the alligator.
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Filed under: On The Road

BIG PINE KEY, FLORIDA-

We are traveling in the rain. We have been traveling in the rain for 6 days. It has rained on us for 6 nights and we are settling in for more. It is wet.

Incredibly, Atlanta has made headlines for its continued drought. We have brought rain here. It started to rain on us in Kentucky, and now in Central Florida– also newsworthy for desert-like conditions– it rains on us still. It has followed us here for the relief of the local flora and fauna. On us, it sincerely sucks. Our Airstream leaks.

It is a wonderful trailer, and indeed, many other 21st Century carnies such as ourselves are beginning to buy vintage coaches, trick them out and hit the road. It really is the best way to travel if you’re show folk. Ours has a leak, possibly two, and more, certainly four or five, when being pulled headlong into showers and sweeping curtains of thunderstorms at 60 MPH. And so it leaks.

Everything is inside is damp, or outright soaked. Nothing dries, since there has been at most an intermission of only a few hours. It’s really crazy making.

I wash the truck– instantly Rain. After three dry days, I set up to test for leaks on the Airstream– Instantly Rain.

20 years ago in Indiana we experienced such a terrible drought and heat wave that full grown trees died due to lack of moisture in the soil. Plans for excavations were canceled as the soil was too dust-like to safely dig; the sides simply caved in. Miles upon miles of interstate roadsides were charred by grass fires started by tossed cigarettes. The foliage was bone dry and dead.

The attendant heat wave was so profound that sound was muffled dead in the air. I would sign off the radio station I was working at announcing 103º temperatures at midnight.

After such a climatic calamity I swore I would never begrudge the rain. Hard to remember after 6 days and nights of RAIN.

The folks here are suffering from lack of rain. We crossed over the Suwannee River, as in the famous Stephen Foster song, and saw it to be a dry sandy river bed. We stopped in High Springs, and saw signs asking to Vote “no” for permits to bottled water developers whose efforts drop the local water table and disrupt the famous caves and springs here — long a Scuba diving mecca. Even in Florida, known for flooding, storms and beaches, water has become serious business.

But the rain received here with such gratitude has fallen on us for hundreds of miles. Makes you feel rather out of touch. How like the unreal world of touring as sideshow performers. Our real-est reality is otherworldly. Are we shaman or merely migrant workers? I decide to figure it all out when the sun shines in my face once more.

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Filed under: On The Road

U.S. Highway 41~

• Dromedaries in a field
• A small crowd of twenty-somethings waving American flags and Ron Paul For President signs at a major intersection in Georgia
• The Florida State Line
• Floyd’s Diner
• Signs of life: political, legal and personal
• Prices going up, going up, going up …
• Rain for six solid days
• Giant’s Camp, Gibsonton, FL
• Showbar, Gibsonton, FL
• A mysterious tree blight
• The End of the Road

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Filed under: On The Road

Tifton, GA~

The place was unassuming and comfortable in its surroundings in the suburbs just slightly outside of Atlanta. Two turns off the highway got us there an hour before it opened. We found ample parking in the lot of the community center next door and cued up some podcasts to pass the time as we contemplated what the interior of the place might look like. When 11am finally arrived we locked up and walked the half block to stand in front of an establishment the size of a small pre-fab house.

Abdullah the Butcher’s House of Ribs and Chinese Food: You’ve got to love the name and the way it makes your pericardium and associated arteries tremble in masochistic anticipation. Alex had decided on the BBQ. I was taking on the Chinese food end of things. Stepping across a veranda that I can only imagine packed with BBQ and wrestling fans on weekends during the summers we walked into a homely dinning area that looked like that of any other strip mall Chinese food purveyor, but this promptly where the similarity ended.

A second room adjacent to the left of the first was outfitted for a more drawn out dining experience, with beautifully upholstered booths and chairs and hardwood tables that gleamed in the scant sunlight coming in through the front windows. It looked like an inviting and comfortable place to be for a planned experience of rich and succulent food, but it was the walls of the first room that really held our interest.
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Filed under: Food & Drink, On The Road

Acworth, GA~

One of the perks of this line of work is the requisite travel taking us practically to the doorstep of
amazing and talented people we know but seldom have the opportunity to see or visit, and one of the perks of driving the U.S. Highway 41 route is that it takes us right through Goodlettsville, TN, the home of one of those particular individuals, Sideshow Bennie.

Fortune favored a meet-up between us all as Bennie was at home and possessed open time when we called to tell him we were a few hours north and hoped to stop through for some fellowship and food. A scant while later we were sharing a most excellent lunch at a local BBQ joint and catching up on all things touring and sideshow related. Since Bennie’s as much of a foodie as we are we made sure to let him know of our plans to visit Abdullah the Butcher’s House of Ribs and Chinese Food a little further down the road in Georgia and promised to deliver a full report.

I look forward to a time when we will all have the opportunity to prepare a good amount of food for one another to enjoy during a longer and more leisurely visit. Perhaps a Big Sideshow Feed is in order sometime during the summer. If it spanned a week it would give acts a chance to come through for a day or two of their choosing and browse the fare that happens to be prepared that day. Say, this just might be a Good Idea …
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Filed under: Comrades in Arms, On The Road