Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Daytona, here we come! We waved goodbye to Summerhouse and Ft. Matanzas and headed toward Palm Coast.
Palm Coast is one of those places that causes confusion in my memory storage unit. I know I’ve heard the name before but not sure when. I know that when Alan, Mom and Dad, and I visited Miami in the early 1970’s, we got free tickets to Lion Country Safari by visiting a new real estate development. But Miami and Lion Country Safari are over a 3-hour drive from Palm Coast so it couldn’t have been when we visited there. Maybe when we went to Disney World (only an hour and a half drive away)? Who knows?
At any rate, more memories flooded in. I do remember visiting a development, climbing a tall tower for the view, being totally bored (I was 14 or 15), and wishing we could just leave. They were selling lots of land for something like $3-5000 which seemed an astronomical sum for a piece of swamp and scrub. Today Palm Coast is a city of 80,000+ residents and the least expensive lots go for $75K.
But we all know about Florida’s boom and bust real estate cycle! I found Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920’s and How it Brought on the Great Depression by Christopher Knowlton to be a fascinating and accessible historical account of the development of Florida’s east coast.
One clear memory from those 1970’s trips was seeing a fully screened-in pool for the first time. How cool, I thought at the time, to be able to lounge by the pool in your backyard all afternoon and evening, protected from mosquitos and other annoyances. Of course, now I think—what happens to those screens during a hurricane?
Confession: they still look inviting.
How do you know you’ve reached Daytona Beach? Condominiums and office towers. We anchored in a spot just before the first bridge we’d have to get under exactly at low tide tomorrow and even then we’re not sure we’ll clear it given the high level of the river. Neither of us will sleep well tonight.
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