Trilliums and Jesus, with Special Guest Stars

It's not quite 6 a.m. and I am back at Dunkin' Donuts in Lutz, my Internet outpost when I'm staying at my stepmother's guest house. The WiFi there isn't hooked up so I hop in the car and come up here, and have a delicious and surely perfectly healthy Boston Kreme donut while I type my blog. I've done it so many times on so many trips that it's become my routine.

Yesterday involved a whole lot of driving. I left Jacksonville about 9 a.m., after my brother and I dropped my niece at school and stopped for a final coffee at Starbucks, where we sat across from each other at a wide, long table, like two attorneys trying to settle a complicated case.

Once on the road, I luxuriated in some solitude and played my iTunes (is there a happier, more vapid song than "The Hustle" by Van McCoy?) while barreling west on I-10 toward my not-so-mysterious destination -- Lloyd, Florida, and fellow blogger Mary Moon.

Mary and I have met several times -- in 2015 and 2019 in Florida, and once in Cozumel, when we happened to be there at the same time. But it's been many years (not since the pandemic) and I really wanted to see her unusual wild trilliums (above) and enjoy a bit of North Florida thrift shopping!

It took me something like two and a half hours to get there, a little longer than I expected, so it was about 11:30 a.m. by the time I pulled into Mary's driveway. We're both native Floridians and we joke that we are long-lost siblings, so greeting her was like greeting family. I also got to say hi to her husband once again and meet her daughter Jessie, who accompanied us on our day's adventures.

We headed to Monticello, a picturesque little nearby town. I'd driven through before but I don't think I'd ever stopped there, and Mary goes there quite a bit, so I was eager to check out the scene through her eyes. We began with lunch at the Rancho Grande Mexican restaurant, which surely has the most colorful dining room in the world. I was so engrossed in conversation with Mary and Jessie that I pretty much ordered the first thing I saw on the menu -- a Speedy Gonzalez, which turned out to be a taco and enchilada with refried beans and rice. Yum!

Monticello has an ornate courthouse (complete with monument to fallen Confederate soldiers) in the middle of a traffic circle at the heart of downtown. The Latin phrase Suum Cuique is inscribed over the door -- "to each his own," which seems typically individualistic in the American vein, but apparently means each constituent will receive fair treatment at the hands of the government.

And then -- shopping! We were in an antique store and I wanted to send a picture to Dave, so I grabbed the ugliest nearby object to use as a prop. "Don't buy that," Dave wrote back.

We had a great time talking and laughing and marveling at the incredible assortment of weird junk populating the shops. We saw a pineapple-shaped ice bucket, which led to a discussion of whether displaying an upside-down pineapple indicates a person is a swinger. (Cosmopolitan magazine confirms this, so it must be true. Far be it from me to question Cosmopolitan on matters of sex.)

Speaking of sex, these paint-by-numbers nymphs were apparently judged too scandalous to display in their entirety.

My childhood babysitter/nanny/surrogate grandmother, Mrs. Kirkland, used to have a poodle like these. I liked the one with the cat-eye glasses, but I wasn't going to pay $48 for it.

Jessie's face says it all.

In the end I only bought three old postcards -- and actually Jessie bought them for me, which was incredibly kind and gave me a fun souvenir. I'll turn them into a future blog post, I'm sure, so whether Jessie knows it or not she has invested in my blog and is now part-owner of the intellectual property contained herein.

We got back to Mary's and I promptly hit the road for the long drive back to Tampa. I was conflicted about which route to take -- the longer but probably smoother all-interstate route, I-10 to I-75, or the shorter but stop-and-go U.S. 19 that hugs the curve of the state's sparsely populated "Big Bend" area. In the end I did the shorter route and it went very smoothly despite the small-town stoplights along he way -- Perry, Cross City, Crystal River. I just cruised along with my iTunes and had a great time. I got to Lutz, the suburb where I'm staying just outside Tampa, about 8 p.m.

It was a long day but well worth it to re-establish human contact with my blog sister!