Sunshine!

We are back from our week plus a day in Florida. Here are some things we saw and did. (We were upgraded to first class on the way down: Janet "I could get used to this." Me, too.)

Friends are forever. We stayed two days in Siesta Key, a funky island community on the Gulf Coast, with Steve and Judy DelViscio. Steve was a Princeton roommate and he and Judy moved to Florida to go into the real estate business in 2005, just when the market tanked. They have a nice house in the highest point in their neighborhood – 5 feet elevation – and are doing much better now. We had a nice supper in town, which boasts that it has not a single chain store or restaurant. We also watched the Princeton women's basketball team beat U. of Wisconsin-Green Bay in the NCAA tournament. We toured the John Ringling house in Sarasota, a fancy palace on the water, but more impressive was a huge diorama (in a separate building) depicting how a circus would arrive by rail, get set up (with all the extras like dining tents, makeup tents, practice rigs, etc.), put on the show and then break and leave town, all in one day. It's the work of one man.

Family is forever. We spent two nights in Naples with Janet's cousin Nancy Byrne Reinhart and her husband Peter. They live in a huge gated and high-walled condo community south of Naples proper, still under construction. We spent the day walking around a large arts fair that closed most of the town's main street, and then had lots of delicious Florida blue crabs at a crab house. Naples has the largest concentration of millionaires and the largest concentration of golf courses (80) in the country. It absolutely reeks money and lots of it. About every three minutes a jet would fly over downtown on its way to the airport. All day. All private jets. Not my life, but the area is rapidly growing.

We also spent two nights at Aunt Georgia's spacious golf-course-side home in Stuart, and spent a lot of time with Rell, her son Jacob and Sarah. This is a nice area of the state – nearby Port St. Lucie is the Met's spring training complex – and all are doing well. Georgia is recovering from hip surgery; she said to Janet "My leg disappoints me." She has round the clock care and her daughters look after her, too. She'll be 94 in a few weeks. Sarah lives in a gated community about 20 minutes away and does a lot of painting. Rell has recently bought a house on the St. Lucie River and takes her canoe out on the river, teaches yoga several days a week and is off to India for a month to work on her knowledge of and devotion to Buddhism. Jacob is a great guy who will graduate from Cal Poly this spring and go up to Seattle to work for Amazon. Great restaurant dinners both nights.

The Everglades may not be forever.

We spent two great days in the Everglades. The original plan had been to spend just one day and then get up to Port St. Lucie to take in a Mets spring training game, but we were glad to have the additional day in the Everglades. I had always thought of this as a dark swamp, but it's not. It's a seemingly endless sawgrass prairie that is wet or damp depending on the time of year, and on the Gulf Coast, an area rightly called the Ten Thousand Islands. We took a boat ride around the islands and saw lots of dolphins. We hiked in an area called Shark River and saw lots of alligators, big blue herons and other exotic birds, striped turtles, and other wildlife. We took another boat ride into Florida Bay, at the southernmost part of the state and enjoyed watching the highly acrobatic ospreys dive for fish and pelicans trolling along the surface of the water. We also took a ranger-guided hike and learned about the gators and birds. I just finished a book about the onslaught of development that continues to degrade the area and adjoining Big Cypress, which is a real swamp.

We stayed in a motel in Homestead, and ate a marvelous genuine Mexican dinner in a dark hole-in-the-wall place.

Money, money, money. On our way from the Everglades to Stuart, we stopped off in Palm Beach to have lunch and to visit the Flagler Museum. On the two block area where we parked for lunch, we saw almost nothing but large Mercedes, BMWs, Lexuses and yes, five Rolls-Royces or Bentleys, four of them convertibles. Across the bay we saw a huge collection of humongous yachts, most of them much bigger than our house. Henry Flagler was the original business partner of John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil of New Jersey, and he built a large Beaux Arts mansion on the Palm Beach waterfront as a wedding present for his third wife. Very, very, very fancy. It was later turned into a hotel and was threatened with demolition, but a niece of his bought it back and $12 million was spent to restore it.

     Well worth the visit: we saw how the other .001% lived then and how they live now.

A day that will forever live in – well, infamy is too strong, but certainly dismay. On Monday, March 23, in the morning I found out that I lost my Supreme Court appeal, 3-2, the majority opinion a completely dishonest pastiche. In the early evening, we watched the Princeton women lose to Maryland.

Overall, a very nice trip. Florida is very very flat: Jacob says the highest elevation in the entire state is 600 feet up in the panhandle. Gated one story communities and subdivisions are absolutely everywhere, interspersed with strip malls. Staying with family and friends is the best way to see any place. Also, I did learn that until I own a Rolls-Royce convertible, I do not want to live in Florida.