Intermittent Falling Iguanas

A word about the weather thus far: cold.  How cold?  I’m glad you asked.  

Since we’ve been on the road we’ve had only a handful of days when it was actually warm enough to sit outside.  But we told ourselves we couldn’t really complain.  Our hometown suffered through one of the coldest and snowiest winters ever.  Our daughters in New York City refused to sympathize, and really, who could blame them?

As we encountered one sub-freezing night and rig-rattling windstorm after another we told ourselves it would all change once we hit Florida.  Ah, Flahdah (as my Auntie Elaine calls it) - Snowbird Central.  We once visited her there in February and I finally understood the point of Florida.  I’d only ever been there on summer holidays with the girls and it was unremittingly ghastly for me.  I hate the heat and don’t get me started on the humidity.

But Florida in February is a glorious place to be.  When it’s 60 degrees in the morning you can always tell the native Floridians: they’re the ones with gloves and coats and earmuffs.  The rest of us are in shorts and t shirts, congratulating ourselves on not sending too many smug pictures back to our strangely silent friends up north.

But we entered Florida in January, having hunkered down in Mobile, Alabama during yet another wind and rainstorm.  Our first stop was a National Park in Pensacola and this is what the forecast showed a few days before our arrival.

And then we heard about that uniquely Floridian weather event: the chance of intermittent falling iguanas down in Miami.  Yep.  It gets so cold that the poor buggers freeze and fall off their branch.  Usually they recover and scuttle off once they thaw a bit, but I’d be hard pressed to say how I’d react if one fell on me.  Or if I could even attempt to navigate through their frozen reptilian bodies.  Imagine if one came alive just as you were carefully stepping over it!  Nope. I’d just close the blinds and lie down until the all-clear siren sounded.   Give me blizzards over lizards any day.

Anyway, the snow had cleared by the time we got to Fort Pickens in the Gulf Islands National Park in Pensacola, but it was still very cold and windy. It took me a moment to remember that it wasn’t leftover snow on the ground outside our trailer but the dazzling white sand.

Oh my, the sand is incredible. Not too many hardy souls out though. It was a brisk 43 degrees.

Fort Pickens is located at the end of a long, narrow spit of sand.  You wonder as you drive along it how it can even exist - the sea is right there.  You could chuck a stick on either side of the road and it would land in water.  Tens of millions of dollars have been spent rebuilding and maintaining this bit of road.  It regularly gets damaged and flooded from storms and hurricanes.  Sometimes campers get stranded for days because they failed to evacuate them in time before a minor storm that nevertheless makes the road impassable.  Of course we knew none of this beforehand.

That’s the spit of sand you drive down.

The only road.

Constant cleanup duty.

The sand spit eventually widens at the end and some trees and vegetation appear. The campground is tight (RV-speak for stupidly narrow roads, close neighbors and difficult back-in sites that require many attempts, a lot of swearing and a seriously large martini afterwards) but it’s pretty great.

Fort Pickens was a surprise too. I knew it was old enough to have been used during the Civil War and I just assumed it was a Confederate fort.  But no, it was a Union fort, having been built by the US government in the 1830s as a coastal defense against foreign attack.  It was built by slaves.  Thirty years later it was used in the war to end slavery.

Yikes!

The Fort was also used as a prison for Native Americans captured during the Indian Wars in the 1880s.  Geronimo was among the Apaches sent there.  

Unlike the falling iguanas, which is truly an “Only In Florida” event for this country, the fact that Fort Pickens and Pensacola are in a different time zone than the rest of the State is not unique.  They, like most of the Florida Panhandle, are on Central Time, while the rest is on Eastern.  Then there’s Port St. Joe which is in that Central zone that sticks out into the Gulf of Mexico.  It’s in a different time zone from the rest of its own county.  I have no idea why this is so and find it quite bizarre.  But that must be just me, because other States do the same thing.  A whole bunch of them as it turns out.  Indiana has to be the most confusing states to live in, with two pockets at opposite ends of the State on the same different time zone (see what I mean?)

How on earth does that work if you’re making an appointment and your dentist is five miles away but in a different time zone?  Are people always an hour early or an hour late?  The mental gyrations involved would make my brain hurt.  A watch wouldn’t help (not that I’ve worn one in years) and nor would my phone.  Right now we’re actually just across the border in Georgia which is solidly on Eastern Time but my iPhone refuses to acknowledge the fact and is still showing Central.  My iPad, however, is on Eastern.  Fortunately I have no appointments.

On the plus side, today is February 1st and here’s the forecast for our next Florida port of call.

Not a falling iguana in sight. I’m trying not to be smug.