Highway 41...Day 8...south to north

(Ah, yes colorful Florida...I'm almost back home with the posts...)

I left South Beach with a card full of digital images and a dead camera battery to proove it, which meant one thing...pulling out the Canon AE-1 and reverting to old school FILM.

I retraced my way back to the A1 which is Biscayne Blvd. Deco is not reserved just for South Beach...it is everywhere in Miami.

Even the Dairy Queen is deco!

A little run down and maybe abandoned, but the lines are still beautiful.

A fine example of Googie style architecture.

I left Miami and headed for Sunny Isles beach which I read about last fall. Sunny Isles was a "sleepy beach community" full of mom and pop motels which lined the A-1 Coastal highway. It came on my radar when I was advised by some people like me (yes there are others like me) that Trump had his eye on the town. Apparantly the Don did not already have enough money...and started buying up real estate and old buildings in order to you guessed it, push people out of their homes, raze the buildings and put up condos (and I'm not kidding...I read an artical about the tactics used to do this). I was told that if I wanted to see any of what used to be classic Florida...to go, soon. That was last fall. This spring...I drove, and I kid you not, 35 miles on THE COASTAL HIGHWAY and did not see the beach once. What I did see was this:

and a lot of these:

THE VISIONARIES!
The nerve.
I say: THE PIRATES.
(see previous post for the pirate story)
They have stolen the sun out of Sunny Isles...cause I also read an artical about these atlantic side condos, that if you want to go to the beach and lay in the sun, you best get there before noon, because after that...the condos cast shadows out to the shore. Imagine, you're at the beach and you are in the shade.
PIRATES.

Being throughly disgusted with construction and the hassels it made in the traffic, I decided I'd seen enough of the new Florida and hit the Interstate and headed north as fast as possible to make it as far north as I could. My mood was lifted when I looked in the rear view mirror and saw this:

As twilight approached, I knew it was going to be my last view of the ocean for another year or two, so I exited at West Palm Beach and found a public beach and took one last walk and look at the beach.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you how much I wanted to sleep under the glow of this neon sign, but it was too early to stop and I had many miles to go before I was north enough to lay my head down for the night.

After a very long trek, almost the enitre length of Florida, and Florida is very tall, folks, here was the stopping point for the night on the outskirts of Jacksonville.
No neon, but classic Florida. Take that, Donald.
(On second thought, don't you dare take that...you've already taken enough)