Category: default || By jt3y

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., June 8 --- There's an old joke about a bank robber who hands a note to the teller that says, "Give me all your money. This is a f--- up."

"You mean this is a stick-up," the teller says.

"No, this is a f--- up," the robber says. "I left my gun at home."

Today was a f--- up. Luckily, I didn't have a gun.

I spent the night in Ft. Myers and had to be in Delray Beach --- on the east coast of Florida --- by 10:30 a.m. My official motor-club-issued road map assured me that I could get from Ft. Myers to Palm Beach in about an hour and 12 minutes. I left Ft. Myers at 8:30 a.m., confident I'd be in Delray Beach with time to spare.

What the motor club map failed to mention was that it would take me the better part of an hour just to get out of Ft. Myers, owing mainly to a big wreck on I-75 that snarled traffic and a "short cut" that turned out to be a "long cut." I had to call my 10:30 appointment and tell him I'd be late. Then I called my 3 p.m. appointment and left a message on his answering machine, asking him if I could reschedule for 5 p.m.

A short digression here: I'm the last living American adult without a cellular phone, owing to my legendary cheapness (see the Florida Diary for June 5). That means all of my calls had to be made from pay phones. Since the deregulation of the phone industry, both the quantity and quality of pay phones has tanked. Of you can find a pay phone, in my experience, there's a better than even chance that the phone will be out of order.

When I pulled into Delray Beach, I stopped at a Hess station and tried calling my 3 p.m. again. The phone took the change and connected the call, but the person on the other end couldn't hear me. That left the two of us shouting "Hello!" at one another until he finally hung up.

I went to my noon, nee 10:30 interview, then found another pay phone. It wouldn't take change. The next pay phone I tried wouldn't dial numbers outside of its own area code. Disgusted, and looking forward to a hot shower before my next appointment, I checked into a motel and called the 3 p.m. again. "I have a 5:30 dinner engagement," he said. "We can't meet at 5. Can you get up here right now?"

It was 3:30, and he was in Hobe Sound, about 20 miles away. "I'll be there as soon as I can," I said, hanging up the phone. As I opened the door, I scanned the "fire escape" information card. After several safety tips --- fill your bathtub with water, don't use the elevators --- I saw the last line. "Above all, keep fighting. Don't quit."

What a comforting thought.

I headed for Hobe, but bad Florida driving bit me, hard, again. I got about two miles on I-95 north before running into a solid wall of traffic; three cars and a tractor-trailer had collided and were smeared across all three lanes. It took about a half-hour before the Florida Highway Patrol got traffic moving on the shoulder.

In the process, I damned near saw another tractor-trailer cream a compact car; the rig's driver leaned out the window and screamed obscenities at the woman driving the compact for a solid minute. Florida drivers put the "Sunshine" in the "Sunshine State."

By the way, if you think the Pennsylvania Turnpike is a mess, then you need to try the Florida Turnpike --- which bizarrely parallels I-95 for a lengthy stretch. The Florida Turnpike --- or excuse me, as the state bills it, "Florida's Turnpike" --- is a narrow, bumpy, and expensive mess. For that matter, I put about a thousand miles on the Monte Carlo in three days, and I can confidently state that many of Florida's interstates and state highways are just as bad as, if not worse than, Pennsylvania's.

One road that didn't seem to be in bad shape, at least for the stretch that I drove, is the legendary U.S. Route 1. I can remember reading a long National Geographic magazine story years ago that followed U.S. 1 from Key West to Maine, and as I left my truncated 3:30 p.m. appointment, I realized that I was on U.S. 1.

I decided to follow it down the coast as far as West Palm, where my hotel was. I rolled down the windows of the Monte Carlo, turned up the stereo, and moved over into the slow lane, driving along and smelling the salt air. In Juno Beach, I stopped at a little park and walked to the beach, where some people were parasailing. The weather since I arrived in Florida has been unremittingly lousy --- gray, humid, hot, drizzly --- but with the strong wind blowing off of the ocean and the colorful parasails in the sky, I found the gray clouds that had been following me around all day were finally lifting.

A little further south, reality intruded again. For several blocks on either side, the big wide boulevard was lined with boarded-up stores, ramshackle motels with peeling paint, and businesses that were damaged by long ago storms and never reopened.

Still, as well-known Floridian Dave Barry often says, I am not making this up: I spotted a rainbow in the sky at Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard. And cruising south along U.S. 1 in the twilight, looking at the palm trees and the Atlantic Ocean and the pastel-colored houses, Florida actually began to look kind of pretty. I could finally understand why someone might want to live here.

Take the advice of the motel warning placard: Keep fighting. Don't quit.