Up the Middle of Florida

In the spirit of trying to avoid Interstates as much as possible, we followed US27 North from Miami up to Gainesville Florida. This route proved to be interesting, although not terribly photogenic. US27 is an excellent road all the way, and was very quiet down south, but progressively got busier and busier.

For the first several hours, US27 looked to be going through the Everglades, with swamps and canals the main thing in view. The swamps gave way to massive development work to drain them and clear them, and then we saw massive sugar farms, and a lot of turf (lawn) growing as well. For a while, much of the traffic on the US27 was very large sugar trucks and machines which look like cane cutters. Full sugar trucks were headed towards occasional large sugar mills, with empty ones going in the opposite direction.

The Lake Okeechobee region and the busy town of Clewiston (where we stayed) seemed to be the centre of the sugar industry. US27 through Clewiston is called the Sugarland Highway, and the town proclaims itself as the "sweetest in America". There was a fishing tournament going on in Clewiston, banners welcoming the participants, and the town was full of enthusiastic boaters. The RV parks were full, but it was pretty quiet in the town's hotels.

Clewiston is rather "off the beaten track" (meaning any town not very close to an Interstate!) and as such, should not have to put up with intolerant and demanding city slickers like ourselves. We walked out of one restaurant which was so overwhelmed with its clientele that night that no waiter came to attend to us (it had just opened a few days earlier, and everyone in town was trying it out, we think). The next restaurant we tried had already been recommended to us as "excellent", but the food was nothing special, the service was charming but naive, and the billing system was primitive. The truth is, legendary American efficiency does not always extend far outside the cities, and it doesn't in Australia either, so we shouldn't be so critical!

Lake Okeechobee is a large natural lake, about 40km square, which once flooded causing massive loss of life and property, so it has since been surrounded by a large levy bank and intensive water management (which gets blamed for water shortages in the Everglades downstream). The lake is only 14ft above sea level, quite amazing given that it drains to the Everglades and is nowhere near the sea. The levy bank itself provides great recreational opportunities (biking, picnicing etc), and incorporates many boat launching facilities to accommodate the fishermen. The lake is strange in that inside the levy is an artificial channel of deep water, and inside that is a lot of shallow or marshy areas, and then inside that, the lake proper, linked to the outer channel by radial channels [photo].

North of Okeechobee along the US27, the sugar industry gives way to oranges (we passed a town with a massive juicing factory), and the countryside becomes what could be called "the Lakes District". The road passes literally dozens of small to large lakes (including Lake Placid), many of which are mostly built up around the edges by holiday homes and boat sheds. Many of these look charming and are very picturesque. The towns around these lakes are obviously very popular with recreational boaters and RV campers. We have never seen so many large and exquisite RVs and fifth-wheeler caravans as we have in this part of Florida, and the state is particularly popular with Harley Davidson riders too, who patrol around usually in small to medium groups, mostly grey power, some couples.

The photo shows a cooperative specimen of local fauna (species unknown to us) which met us in the grounds of a very quiet Visitors' Centre near Leesburg.

From the lakes district north, as the US27 bypasses Orlando to the west, the path of this highway is almost 100% built up and urbanised. The towns look to be not so significant on the map, but on the ground they seem to link together to become a huge (or long) suburban sprawl. In some areas, the development is very new and affluent, other parts look to be older and maybe a little bit jaded. We are impressed that the new developments appear to incorporate excellent roads and to gain their commercial infrastructure at the same time as if not before the bulk of the residential development. This forward planning does not seem to occur in Australia. We are not so sure about public transport, trains or buses. The planning paradigm in the USA seems to revolve around motor vehicles, and often even sidewalks (footpaths) are overlooked. We see very few pedestrians except in very poor areas, or "retirement" suburbs, or along beach paths. We normally wish to walk to restaurants at night if they are within a kilometer or so, but often we cannot due to lack of sidewalks or lights.


By the time the US27 arrived in Gainesville, the weather was again cool but sunny, and we realised that it was now looking like what we remember of Georgia, especially Savannah, lots of very large trees with Spanish Moss hanging in them. We have at last left the swamps of the Everglades!

Gainesville itself is a delightful university town (University of Florida), leafy and low rise. Most streets have marked cycleways, and although these are not safely separated from cars, their very presence shows a refreshingly different planning attitude prevailing in this town. We looked at an intriguing geographic feature known as the Devil's Millhopper, a very large sinkhole which supposedly resembles a mill hopper. This deep hole is traversed with walking trails where we took the photo.