Travel Blog

“I’m looking for a good place to have breakfast,” I told the young man in the FSU jacket who had pulled up next to me at the stop sign.

“Olean’s,” he said, and then, after giving me directions, commanded: “Follow me.”

We drove for about a minute and then pulled into a slanted parking lot. “I eat here all the time,” he said, before driving off.

Inside, two soldiers sat head-to-toe in camouflage, two older gentlemen (one in a bow tie) were eating eggs and grits, and a young couple, probably students (across the street sat the campus of Florida A&M), were tucking into stacks of pancakes. I was the only person who was alone. I was also the only person who was white.

 When I volleyed her “How are you?” back to the woman behind the counter she said “Thank you for asking” with a sincerity that startled me. The woman at the cash register was another fount of sweetness. When the first woman brought my breakfast to my table I opened the Styrofoam container and noticed that the two rashers of bacon I had ordered had grown to five.

 One of the joys of travel is eating breakfast out, especially when you find a local institution, and never in such a place had I been made to feel so welcome.

 Fortified, I got back in the car and drove to the campus of FSU, winding, on Chieftan Way, through moneyed sports facilities. I found a parking lot and walked to the bookstore, where I made my way to the section of Faculty Authors. While I was leafing through David Kirby’s The House on Boulevard St. an employee – a tall, middle-aged woman – came down the aisle and asked me “How are you doing today?” But she didn’t keep walking, she stopped - waiting to hear.

 I took a stroll through campus, a gracious spread of stately red brick buildings set off by that tantalizing mix of live oaks and palm trees. (The Deep South with a whiff of the tropics.) Who needs ivy when you have Spanish moss? And topography. Students passed me on the hills, many of them wearing their school colors.

 At what looked like the main entrance, I came upon a statue of a man sitting on a bench. Reading the plaque, I learned that this was Francis W. Eppes, grandson of Thomas Jefferson and founder of Florida State University.

 I worked for 19 years as the travel editor of a Florida newspaper and no freelancer ever told me that our third president’s grandson founded FSU. No freelancer ever sent me a story about Tallahassee. They were too busy writing about St. Augustine, Key West, and Disney World.

 I’ve watched a good number of FSU football games over the years, and no announcer has ever dropped the name Eppes during a broadcast. There is a lot of down time in football; I once read that, in a three-hour game, there are about 19 minutes of actual playing time. Couldn’t Verne Lundquist, during a timeout some Saturday afternoon, inform viewers that, by the way, this football powerhouse was once a seminary founded by the grandson of Thomas Jefferson? Wouldn’t that be an interesting aside?

 But people don’t tell you things. This is why you have to travel.

 (To be continued.)