On Sunday morning, 31 July, I awoke to my first sights and sounds of the Emerald Coast. This particular stretch of Florida’s Gulf Coast along Santa Rosa Island and Choctawhatchee Bay is famous for its rich green waters and white sandy beaches. The sight of the bay out my window was one of the first reminders of where I was, that I was not in fact back home in Kansas City nor in that modern hotel room in Nashville. No, I was now in the Gulf Coast, the southern seaboard, of the United States.

I spent the better part of the first day on our balcony attending to a series of morning Zoom calls, before heading out to the beach around lunchtime. In preparation for the beach, I replaced my usual slip-on shoes and black socks for a pair of brown leather sandals that I bought for a day-long float trip down the upper reaches of the Colorado River back in the Summer of 2018. Still, I retained my usual khaki trousers and summer golf shirt, lest I move entirely out of the realm of comfort. 

I quickly found that I had arrived at the beach well after much of the seashore fun had passed. The majority of my relatives had had their fun in the ocean waters that morning and were now returning to their rooms to beat the worst of the afternoon sun. So went most of that week in Destin. I found myself caught up in my own over-thinking more than in enjoying the moment, and never did go for that swim in the ocean that everyone kept talking about. The complexity of the idea left me hesitant and wandering that far from a place where I could dry off and change back into my normal clothes without potentially expanding the reach of the ocean or its sandy shores even further was my limit.

On Monday I boarded one of two pontoon boats that carried the 24 of us from my family who made the trip to the seaside and traveled from Destin Harbor out to an apparently famous local haunt called Crab Island. I imagined it would be a large rock tethered to the ocean floor that would be just big enough to be a curiosity for all the tourists flocking to the emerald waters there and was pleasantly surprised to find that Crab Island was actually a shallow part of the bay which allowed for people to walk with ease through the water without much risk of drowning. As with my thoughts on Sunday, I did not join in the aquatics and remained firmly on the boat, but I still enjoyed the time out on the water.

That evening several from our group went to a local pub in the area called McGuire’s that reportedly has some of the best steaks in the country. I considered it but ended up trying their bangers and mash, which were so wonderfully memorable. While I was there, I participated in an unusual custom local just to that establishment of signing dollar bills and stapling them to the walls of the pub. In my own case, my dollar bill was signed “Bhí Seán Ó Catháin anseo, 1 Lúnasa 2022.” After the fact I kicked myself realizing I forgot a key part of the verb, which should have been written “Bhí Seán Ó Catháin anseo é, 1 Lúnasa 2022.” Still, should you be in the area and want to see it, my dollar bill is likely there stapled onto the lid of a very large barrel (I thought of it as a hobbit door) in the room behind the gift shop.

On Tuesday I got to experience the power of the thunderstorms that build up on the Gulf of Mexico. Most of Tuesday the skies remained cloudy and gray, with various stages of rain from sprinkles to showers falling down on the barrier island that we were staying on. The island in question is the easternmost reaches of Santa Rosa Island, a long and skinny barrier island stretching from Pensacola Harbor in the west to Destin Harbor in the east. Yet as a great many cases in this country’s long history longstanding naming conventions couldn’t be allowed to get in the way of a good marketing opportunity, and in 1950 at the urging of a local developer the eastern 1/3rd of Santa Rosa Island was transferred from Santa Rosa County to Okaloosa County and renamed Okaloosa Island, the name you can buy on keychains, t-shirts, and tag on your Instagram stories when you visit.

We stayed in a beach resort on Okaloosa Island called Destin West. The resort is split between a bayside horseshoe and a beachside block. Our condo in the middle of that bayside horseshoe was a 7th floor penthouse with a neat rooftop balcony that provided marvelous sunrise and sunset views over both the Gulf of Mexico and Choctawhatchee Bay. What’s more, I was delighted by the visions of the night sky that flickered into view each night from that rooftop. On Sunday night my parents and I ventured up onto our rooftop and spent a good hour gazing up at the stars. The sky was first illuminated by the pinpoint of light that is Arcturus, roughly 36.7 light years distant from Earth. Thereafter we gazed up, me laying in a sun-bathing chair, as more and more stars greeted us as the light of our Sun faded further below the western horizon. My Dad and I saw an even better view of the night sky a few hours later when we wandered down to the beach to try and get some wave recordings for this podcast, seeing then the band of the Milky Way arc over our heads in all its nebular glory.

I’m sad to report the wave recordings came out as static. I guess I needed a better microphone.

The other great highlight from the week in Destin was all the time I got to spend with my family: parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and the young children of my cousins. Many of you are listening or reading this week, and I hope this makes my appreciation for all of you very clear. On Tuesday night, I went out on the town with some of my cousins, going towards Destin’s Harborwalk where we enjoyed some of the local music, some good food and drink, and for several of my kin a nice jump off a perfectly good tower. A few days later I returned with more relatives, this time parents and kids included, and got to rediscover that Harborwalk all over again in the daytime.

One of the more fascinating experiences that I had while on the Emerald Coast was visiting first the Native American mound located in downtown Fort Walton Beach, and secondly a sea turtle conservation center in Navarre Beach. The mound was likely built around 850 CE by a people identified archeologically as the Pensacola Culture (fl. 1100–1700). The mound builders in Fort Walton Beach were among a wider culture of mound builders extending throughout the interior of North America called the Mississippian Culture who dominated the Mississippi Basin from around 800 to 1600. Among the most famous Mississippian mounds is Cahokia, located just across the Mississippi from St. Louis in Illinois, which remains one of the top archeological sites I still want to visit. The Mississippians mysteriously disappeared just before the arrival of the Europeans in North America without much certainty as to why. I for one would love to learn more about them.

The Navarre Beach Sea Turtle Conservation Center has a lot in common with many a local science center that I’ve visited, including Broome County, NY’s Kopernik Observatory. It’s staffed by locals who clearly are not only dedicated to the center’s mission but are also themselves keeping the lights on, and it seems to be a focal point of a local advocacy message within the community. The Gulf Coast is home to a wide range of animals and plants, among which are several species of sea turtles. We got to see one green sea turtle named Sweet Pea who lives in the pool located inside the Conservation Center. Sweet Pea was found in Gulf Shores, Alabama with fishing wire stuck far down her throat and wrapped all around her body. In the veterinarians’ efforts to save her they ended up having to amputate one of her front legs, and she’s also missing a piece of her shell, but now she lives a happy life in her pool. Sea turtles are increasingly threatened by human activities along the coast, including fishing, littering, and the use of white flashlights on beaches at night which keep the sea turtles from laying their eggs in the sand out of fright. This is one area where sea turtle conservation and astronomy intersect, as in both cases red flashlights are far better to use than white or blue ones, as red is a cooler color and less blinding to the eyes of either a human or, clearly, a sea turtle.

Over the last few days of my time in Destin I got to know the roads leading out of that resort town quite well, volunteering to drive a parade of relations to the local airport for their own flights home. On Friday morning, 5 August, I made my own departure from Destin, driving north toward Interstate 10 which I took east. I first stopped in Tallahassee, the state capital, with the sole intention of seeing the Florida State Capitol and then returning to the highway to finish my drive southeast to Orlando. As it turned out, I ended up getting lunch at a local Whataburger, refueling, and making a very brief stop at the State Capitol to photograph it, resulting in an hour delay in Tallahassee. This pushed my arrival in Orlando back from late afternoon to early evening, yet that was only the first delay.

One of the things I noticed foremost about driving on Florida’s highways is how aggressive the drivers in the Sunshine State are. In the Midwest if the speed limit is 70 mph the traffic might flow at around 75-79 mph, yet here with a similar 70 mph speed limit the traffic was staying steady if forceful at a grander 85 mph. I quickly caught on and kept up with the traffic, finding I was getting cut off and being honked at less by the locals and tourists alike, and after a few hours of driving I merged off I-10 and I-75 and onto Florida’s Turnpike, a tollway which runs northwest to southeast across Central Florida and then down the Atlantic coast until terminating near Miami. I was excited to see what this turnpike would be like, as every state tends to like to give their tollways their own particular flair. Massachusetts for one has grand signs arching over their turnpike at every service plaza, and Illinois––the state of my birth––used to have a network of toll oases that were glass bridges over the tollways, most of which are now gone, though they’ve kept the very large circular oasis building on I-88 in DeKalb. Florida’s Turnpike proved to be about as overstated as I expected, with its grand service areas that were advertised nearly once every mile. 

I wasn’t planning at stopping at any of them but ended up pulling over at the first one I came across because of a warning sign I saw almost as soon as I’d merged onto the turnpike: “All lanes blocked at US-27 due to wreck, find alternate route.” I checked my map and confirmed that US-27 was between where I was and Orlando. So, I turned to my car’s navigation system and found an alternate route that would take me off the turnpike before the wreck and back on again just after it. “Great!” I said, pulling back onto the highway. It was only a half an hour later when I was pulling off the turnpike and onto my alternate route that I began to realize how frustrating this would be, as that alternate route took me from a 70 mph highway onto a series of rambling backroads that led to the northernmost suburbs of Orlando where farm traffic mixed with the Mercedes and Volvos going to and from the new neighborhoods and resorts that were being built in those farm and swamp lands.

Finally, finally after another hour of meandering through the backroads of Central Florida I returned to the turnpike well past the wreck that had shut down “Florida’s Main Street” and into one of Central Florida’s famous summer thunderstorms. Now, I’m from Tornado Alley so I know a thing or two about thunderstorms, but I can swear to you now that these Florida thunderstorms are nothing like the ones that build up off the eastern face of the Rockies and rain down on the Great Plains. Oh no, these are tropical downpours that build up as the cold Atlantic air meets the warm Gulf air over Central Florida, itself a barely-above-sea-level peninsula and proceeds to dump all the water the heavens can muster onto anyone below. It reminded me of what the Ferengi on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine say about the rains on their home planet Ferenginar, “No, it never rains, it only pours!” As a matter of fact, the hyper-profit hungry Ferengi may well be a good model for understanding Florida, or what I saw of Florida, a state that has a noticeable government bureaucracy (just look at all the tollways around Orlando) but maintains a strong “Survival of the Fittest” attitude about life. I even argued on multiple occasions during my time in the state that they ought to change their state motto to that: “Florida, the Sunshine State. Survival of the Fittest.” The remainder of my time in Florida was marked by the threatening clouds of its immense thunderstorms.

I stayed in the tourist area south of downtown Orlando near International Drive with the idea that if I was close to a couple major highways, I’d be able to get to my two main destinations on that part of the Longest Commute easier. Still, I was overjoyed to discover that I was effectively staying in a part of town that could be called Chicago South, for no sooner had I gotten there than I realized there was a new Portillo’s location just a few minutes’ drive from my hotel. For those of you who aren’t aware, Portillo’s is a chain of Chicago restaurants serving local favorites from the city of my birth like Chicago hot dogs, Italian beef sandwiches, Maxwell St. Polish Sausages, Italian Sausages, as well as burgers, salads, and Mrs. Portillo’s famous chocolate cake. And yeah, I may have eaten there a few times while I was in the area, seeing as I haven’t gotten back to Chicago since 2020 yet.

On Saturday, 6 August I decided to go into Orlando and see what there was to see in a city famous for its theme parks that wasn’t actually in a theme park. I was kind of interested to go to Disney World again, 25 years after my last visit at the age of 4, in large part because there was a rumor (I could never confirm it) that they have a toco toucan (Ramphastos toco), which is the one that’s at the center of the action in Chapters 5 and 6 of my dissertation. Yet with all that said it turns out that the Orlando theme parks are far too expensive to visit on a TA stipend, especially when you’re just going as an individual and not with a significant other or a group. So, instead I went to visit my two usual haunts in a new city: the local science museum and the local art museum. 

The Orlando Science Center is located in a large round building on the edge of a city park that was built in the 1990s. It houses a lot of wonderful science exhibits aimed at introducing children to the main topics of the STEM fields, and it’s clear the children of Orlando get a lot out of that museum, which is wonderful. The one hall that I spent a fair bit of time in, the one hall that was the closest to what I’ve come to expect in a science museum, was the dinosaur hall, where a series of casts of famous fossils were found, including a cast of Stan the T.  Rex. That said, I was out of the Orlando Science Center in just over 30 minutes, having seen pretty much the entire place. Thankfully, my ASTC membership got me in there for free.

From the Science Center I decided to walk across the park to the Orlando Museum of Art, a pretty building set into the far edge of the park from the Science Center. I paid my admission fee and began to stroll around their limited galleries, finding one on Ancient American art especially fascinating, but the rest of it, a collection of contemporary art from around Florida, was not really my style. I do love some types of contemporary art, especially contemporary architecture and the smooth lines that evoke it in paintings and sculpture, but I’m not as fond of the imperfections that seemed to be glorified in the art on display in that museum. It’s just not my taste. A bit let down by that experience, on the walk back to the car I searched on my phone for another museum I remembered seeing when I was researching this trip, and while I thought I found it I instead ended up at the art museum on the beautiful campus of Rollins College, one of the top liberal arts colleges in the South, and somewhere based on what I read and saw of the place I wouldn’t mind teaching at someday, perhaps.

The main reason why I chose to go to Orlando was to use that city as a launching off point for a day trip east to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Some of my earliest memories are of pictures from the Apollo program and of the space shuttles in books and on TV. Those of you who have read and listened to the Wednesday Blog (thank you!) will know that I’m a space nerd. So, when I heard we were doing a family trip to Florida, I first looked up how far our vacation spot was from the Cape.

I arrived at the Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex at 8:15 am, a full hour and 15 minutes before the gates opened, which meant I was also one of the first in line to go through those gates when they did open at 9:30 am. The opening of the Visitor Complex every day is announced by the playing of the national anthem over the PA system, in a rousing and triumphal manner that proved to be a sign of things to come. I began my tour of the KSC by catching the tour bus to go out to the Apollo-Saturn building a few miles northeast from the main Visitor Complex near the Vehicle Assembly Building, where NASA’s spacecraft are put together and stored before launch) and launchpads 39A and B where both the Apollo missions of 1969–1972 and the Artemis missions of my generation have and will launch from. At the time that I visited, 7 August 2022, Artemis 1 was housed inside the Vehicle Assembly Building awaiting its launch to orbit the Moon. The launch window is scheduled for 29 August at the earliest, a few days after this episode is scheduled to be released. So, fingers crossed that it works!

In the Apollo-Saturn building I got to see a mockup of the Apollo mission control, a Saturn V rocket, and an inspiring half-video, half-staged performance telling the story of Apollo 11’s landing on the Moon in the summer of 1969. I found all the videos that greet you when you enter each building at the KSC to be quite triumphant and grandiose in their tone and music. It’s actually quite fun, though a bit jarring in our current climate of division and fear in this country. 

The building I liked the most was the Atlantis building, which houses the Space Shuttle Atlantis and honors the space shuttle and ISS programs all together. As much as Apollo and Sky Lab were the space programs of my parents’ youth, so the Space Shuttle and ISS were the space programs of my youth. It was quite moving for me to finally see a space shuttle up close, and the feelings of bitter sadness that I felt when the shuttles were retired in 2011 returned ever so slightly. I was almost moved to tears seeing the memorials in that building dedicated to the Challenger and Columbia crews who lost their lives in 1981 and 2003 respectively. Many people in my parents’ generation have said that they stopped watching space launches after Challenger broke up upon liftoff, and as for myself I can remember when the news bulletin came in on NPR announcing that Columbia had broken up upon reentry into the atmosphere on that warm Sunday, 1 March 2003. 

My Dad and I were out in the fields on our farm, doing what I can’t remember, and he kept the radio running in his truck that time. As I heard the news I remember looking up to the south and seeing a jet trail far up in the sky. Now, I know that Columbia broke up over Texas, not Kansas, but in my memory that jet trail was Columbia in its last moments. It’s a memory that will always stick with me.

After a nice lunch in the Cosmic Café, I returned to my touring, visiting the Mars building to see the end of an inspiring video telling us “The first human to walk on Mars is living among us today!” with a NASA employee up on the stage pointing out into the audience saying proudly “and that person could be one of you!” I for one am curious about the idea of going up into Space, maybe someday I’ll do it, but for now I don’t think I’m healthy enough for it. From there I walked over to the new Gateway building, which houses a collection of new and newly proposed spacecraft from NASA’s commercial partners including SpaceX, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, among others. One example from a company whose name I can’t remember was an expandable space habitat which at its full size is 3-storeys tall and can serve as a home, workplace, and laboratory for the astronauts onboard whether in orbit, in transit, or on the surface of another world.

My final stop at the KSC was in the Heroes building, an exhibit which honors the NASA and allied astronauts who have ventured up into Space over the last 60 years beginning with the Mercury 7. The building culminates with the NASA Astronaut Hall of Fame, at the center of which stands a fine statue of astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to leave our home planet in 1961.

I left the Kennedy Space Center at 3 pm, a good 6 hours after I first passed through the entry gates, having fully enjoyed my day. The one thing, after leaving and now writing about that experience that I wish I’d done is bought a pack of NASA themed playing cards that were for sale in the gift shop.

The following morning, I was up at 9 and out of my hotel by 10:45 for one of the most memorable legs of any trip to date. I was leaving Florida not by road but by rails. At 12:30 I had the Mazda Rua loaded onto the car-carriers attached to the rear of the Auto Train and boarded it myself at 15:30, sitting happily in my sleeper compartment, my roomette, when we pulled out of Sanford, Florida at 5 ‘o clock that evening. I enjoyed the complimentary dinner service in the dining car, choosing the Amtrak Signature Flatiron Steak with green beans and a baked potato, along with a starter salad with Newman’s Own Light Italian dressing, a dinner roll, and a glass of Chardonnay. The 3-course meal was finished off with a slice of cheesecake, a sign of where I was headed, back to the Northeast after an overnight stop in the DC area.

I fell asleep on the night of Monday, 8 August somewhere in southern South Carolina to the gentle sound of the rails beneath me, the soft swaying of the Superliner sleeper car an old and comfortable feeling to me, having experienced it a handful of times on the Southwest Chief between Kansas City and Chicago. Sleep came late, with dreams of an old Mozart tune floating in my head. “Bona nox …”