A Long Rainy Drive

I spent almost all day yesterday behind the wheel of a car. Remember how I wrote several weeks ago about how hungry I was for a road trip? Well, I sated some of that hunger by driving from Jacksonville back to Tampa on little back roads through tiny towns like Florahome and Interlachen and Fort McCoy. These are not places I'd ever been before, at least not that I remember.

Since I spent so much time driving, I didn't have an opportunity to take many pictures. So today's post consists of a roundup of Florida photos I've collected over the past few days. The bright bromeliad (above) was growing by the side of the road near my stepmother's house. I think it's an escapee from someone's garden.

I liked this bright manatee-motif mailbox. Manatees sort of look like mailboxes, actually.

I stopped at a drug store to buy some shaving cream and razors, and an oak tree outside the front door was teeming with these odd little fuzzy caterpillars. They were all over the tree, sidewalk and asphalt. I rescued a few of them from the parking lot and put them back on the tree -- because how bleak to be a tiny caterpillar stranded on a vast expanse of hot pavement -- but there were way too many to even consider doing that for more than a handful. I'd have been there a week! I think it was all very amusing to the woman behind the counter of the drug store.

I believe these caterpillars are the larvae of a tussock moth.

In Jacksonville, some of the manhole covers feature an image of Andrew Jackson (the city's namesake) on horseback.

This was a street I passed on my drive back to Tampa yesterday. Isn't that a great name? It didn't look especially infernal, though -- just a harmless dirt road.

Here's today's Florivideo™! It's a very simple one. I got caught driving in the rain for a lot of my trip -- in fact, a downpour at times. This just gives you a sense of what that was like, with ambient sound.

And finally, near Silver Springs in Ocala, I passed some great old mid-century motels.

In Pasco County I took a quick detour through our old neighborhood to see what used to be our family home, which my mom sold back in 2015. It looked pretty good, though the new owners have replaced the windows, painted the house an avocado green and changed the landscaping. They left the pine trees in the front yard, at least. The whole neighborhood is much more built up than I remember. I'm probably picturing it more like it was when I was a kid -- widely spaced houses on big lots with lots of citrus trees and nature. Now the development is more dense.

I'm off to meet my friend Sue for an early morning walk!