The May issue of The Atlantic features an article by Helen Lewis titled “The Magic Kingdom of Ron DeSantis: My very British romp through America’s weirdest state.” Unfortunately (from my perspective) it’s more a dissection of the governor than an exploration of Florida, but there are moments of travel writing that, curiously, made me glad there weren’t more.
Lewis was told that there are the three Floridas: the Panhandle, central Florida, and the south. There are more Floridas, of course; South Florida is a completely different entity from southwest Florida. Also, except for The Villages, central Florida is not, as she states, particularly ripe with seniors (unless you’re counting horses and cattle – which I’m sure she wasn’t; that Florida went completely unmentioned). Retirees, like most Floridians, tend to gravitate to the coasts.
And her summation of “south” Florida? A place “where condo towers and bustling Spanish-speaking enclaves merge slowly into the laid-back beaches of the Keys.”
Any writer who associates beaches with the Keys is revealing her ignorance. There’s also the strange division of “condo towers” and “Spanish-speaking enclaves” (I’ll ignore the cliché of “bustling” just as I did the one of “laid-back”.) Does she think no Hispanics own condos – even in Miami? In Brickell, Coconut Grove, Coral Gables, the condo towers are Spanish-speaking enclaves. Admittedly, they may not be all that bustling.
No one is more critical than a travel writer reading an article on his home.
