Today, I awoke in Tampa, the city on the other side of Tampa Bay. Tampa is the ying to St. Petersburg’s yang. While St. Petersburg promotes art, tourism, and sunshine, Tampa is a working port where people work hard and then have fun afterward. For the flavor of popular culture, consider that Tampa has so many strip clubs the url=http://www2.tbo.com/static/news-special-reports-data-bay/tbo-special-report-database-strip-clubs/local paper puts out a guide (WARNING: Link Not Safe For Work) whenever a major sports event comes to town, and Hooters (WARNING: Link may be offensive) was started in nearby Clearwater. Tampa Museum of Art Tampa is more than hot pants, a theme park, and office towers, however. It has a downtown park with some excellent museums. Most of it was built in the last ten year... read more

Today I explored Myakka River in earnest. The park shelters a now rare landscape called a dry prairie , the same ecosystem found in parts of Okefenokee Swamp (see ). During the dry season, it’s a traditional prairie with seas of high grass. The rest of the year it floods and becomes a swamp. Within the grass are groups of trees called hammocks. These also flood in heavy rain. This environment attracts birds and reptiles accustomed to a hot and wet climate. Hammock Nature Trail The grass is filled with wood ticks which carry disease at this time of year, so I focused on the hammocks. The park has helpfully created a nature trail which ... read more

This morning, I awoke in Tampa, Florida. Tampa is an old port town that has become one of the state’s leading growth centers. It has a beautiful historic district and some good museums. Tourists don’t come here for any of that. They come here for the Busch Gardens theme park. Since theme parks are now an essential part of Florida culture, I came here (for now, anyway) to join them. I chose this park out of all the parks in Florida because I haven’t seen it in a long time, and the rides at Disney have become too tame for my tastes. That wouldn’t be a problem at Busch Gardens. For some reason, all of the low priced hotels near Busch Gardens are lousy. The chains known for descent standards, like La Quinta, take a nose ... read more

The Georgia coast is composed of a series of low-lying, swampy islands, called the Golden Isles. Most of them were plantations before the Civil War. Afterwards, they were taken over by black families. These days, most of them have been developed into beach resorts. The remainder are now wildlife refuges that are extremely important to local birds. These refuges are the only places where the coast can be seen as it was before English settlement. Harris Neck Wildlife Refuge My first stop is one of only two refuges that are easily accessible from a road, Harris Neck. While it looks like primeval forest, it’s really only been here since the 1950s. The area was originally a plantation, and t... read more

St. Patrick's Day When one thinks of Irish cities in the US, one tends to think of the big cities of the northeast: New York, Boston, Chicago. In fact, the city with the highest percentage of Irish descendents is Savannah. Irish first arrived in large numbers in the 1830s to build the Central Georgia Railroad. As one manager put it at the time, he preferred Irish to slaves because Irishmen had no value and could be worked to death with impunity. Far more arrived after the Great Potato Famine. The quote above amply demonstrates how they were treated at the time. They ultimately organized and took over the city government after Reconstruction. Given the population, url=http://www.savannahga.... read more