Day four, Florida panhandle

If you'd like to see the full effects of a massive oil spill coupled with a major housing crisis, come to the Florida panhandle. At least that's what it looks like upon driving through. I would guess that roughly a third of the buildings (houses and businesses) are abandoned, another third are for sale and maybe half of the rest are lived in. We drove past many areas that had been primed for development but whose sales offices are now closed and in one case, burned. It's going to be really interesting driving down toward Naples today. It's always been a more affluent area, I'm really hoping it still is.

I still love Florida in spite of the mess she's in. One town in particular is Apalachicola. It's a great little old Florida fishing village. So cute with it's cottages and Key West style homes. There is a great down town area where we shopped and ate a few years ago when we still had our place in Panama city beach. Speaking of PCB, wow has it grown... Maybe that's where everybody went. It's built up and busy, but I've checked real estate prices and I know they are about 40% lower than they had been six years ago.

We stayed at a little rv park called the ho hum. It's in Carrabelle, which is bigger then I imagined. Again, it's a fishing village but not as cute as Apalachicola. It's located in a bay, kind of. There is a huge island off the coast that is creating the bay affect, where the water looks more like lake water. Could also be because it's really shallow. We saw some people fishing out on the resorts dock so we brought the dogs out to meet them. They got scared and left. The people, not the dogs. An unfriendly man caught a couple of small catfish.

It seems like the world gets smaller everyday. The motorhome that is parked next to us is owned by a couple from Wisconsin who used to live in Anoka and worked in Elk River, which is the town I grew up in. Weird. They too, sold everything they owned to hit the road. Of course they are at the age when that kind of thing seems normal.

I'm finding the uncertainty of each day kind of appealing. I've always been one to build things up in my head so big that the reality of it could never meet my expectation. But something changed in me over that last few years, probably due to the constant beat down of reality. One thing I've learned for sure is that if you have NO expectations, you will not be disappointed. That sounds bad, I mean, go with the flow and enjoy the moment or the space you're in, absorb it, realize it, then if you don't feel like you need to stay, leave.