I’m Touring America «

I’m Touring America

Thursday 23rd January 2020

So I arrive in Florida by air. A family wedding is to take place at La Bella Collina which is in Tuscany near Orlando, Florida. Just so extraordinary. Florida is Paradise. Nothing disturbs its faultless Paradise. There are no hills. Just an unrivalled smoothness of forest with intermittent glories high towering above, such as the Ritz Carlton Elysium, the Marriot Towers of Heaven, the Hilton Choirs of Angels. Uber-ing through, you see the residential complexes – lawns, dream homes, blinds down, no sign of a person, such is the paradise. I sent a photo to Cousin Smurry in England of the view from the hotel. She said it looked like one of those pictures you get online when you have to prove you’re not a robot. Select all the windows with no traffic lights. Well, that’s rather wild. Persons are conveyed by car. They do not get out. But our little pre-wedding party went walking. It was boiling, boiling hot. Perfect for mad dogs and Englishman. What a struggle it was to make Florida. We learned from a display and park with pioneer village. Before it was a swamp with crocodiles. Within 20 years they’d got nearly all known industries going. First of all, logging from cutting down the swamp cypresses, then cattle, water, oil, oranges and feathers. Also fish. And hammering. One placard said, ‘Minnie Moore-Willson Plume Hunting Heroine’. Thrilling. Think of all those hats. Heroine indeed, I thought, enabling truly feathered hats in abundance. But no, it turned out, on reading the placard, that she’d fought to put a stop to feathers for hats. So disappointing. In the pioneer village, they had Georgian windows even if the home was barely a hut on brick piers. People were living like this until the 1960s, although they seemed to have acquired extensive land and cattle.