Third Time's the Charm in Florida
I don’t remember why I decided that, this year, Florida would be where I would hide from winter. I know that I had already made up my mind before Thanksgiving. I made a reservation in November for a place that sounded really cool: a tiny house on a rescue farm in the Jacksonville area, for the months of February and March. (I gave myself all of January to drive down, starting with a couple of long days’ drive to get far enough south that I could count on daytime temperatures above 55 F at least three days a week.)
I was in a vacation condo in Myrtle Beach (those are really affordable in the off season) when I got a call telling me that the tiny house listing had been a scam all along. The woman who called had been named as the host on the listing, but she hadn’t known that. The owner of the tiny house, after getting a lot of bad reviews, had hacked into her account, then listed all his units there where they would show up as “new” and not “hosted by a jerk”. She seldom used her account and only found out about all this when bad reviews started showing up in her mailbox.
I got my money back, but I had arranged everything for Jacksonville, so I settled for a bedroom and bathroom in somebody’s house for those months. The hosts were nice and everything but it really wasn’t what I had in mind. (Also, Jacksonville is the South but it’s not the subtropics. January was mostly chilly and rainy, with only a few periods of the kind of weather the Florida tourism industry led me to expect.)
While there, I looked around for my April stay. I decided to go to the Caribbean coast purely because I’d never been there. Once again, I found a cool-sounding place, this time in the Fort Myers area. It was the home of a professional artist who had done the whole place in a really creative, colorful way, as shown through photos in the listing. I didn’t want to drive all the way from Jacksonville to Fort Myers in one day, so I made a reservation for one night in a very basic little room in Kissimee. It didn’t sound too great but I figured I’d only be there for one night so it didn’t matter.
Four days before my departure from Jacksonville, the host of the Fort Myers place called me. She sounded like she’d been crying. She said that her grown son had been hospitalized and when he came out of the hospital he would need to stay with her while he recovered, so she needed her spare room for him and therefore couldn’t rent it to me. I don’t think she had ever had to cancel a reservation before. I had to tell her that she needed to go on the website and do it.
There was no way I was going to get my act together to choose another place in only four days. I couldn’t extend my stay in Jacksonville because there was another tenant coming right after me. But the Kissimee reservation could be extended out to two weeks, so I did that just to have some time to think.
Kissimee is part of greater Orlando, which is more than a modest resort town for exactly one reason: Disney World. In a way it was kind of surreal. Disney World was a significant element of my childhood TV viewing experience, but I never thought of it as a real place. Now I was seeing those names out of the past on highway signs. Exit for the Magic Kingdom. Exit for Wide World of Sports. Exit for Epcot.
While I was feeling my way around the area, I discovered, about thirty miles away, one of those organic farms that sells directly to the public, that are one of the things I miss about central Massachusetts. They have, not just the big three of meats, but also lamb, goat and duck, including duck parts, so I don’t have to buy a whole bird and then spend a week eating it. They have organic organ meats, which are almost impossible to find. They have actual fresh goat milk! I can just drink a glass of milk like a normal person because it’s goat milk! (Yes, I know that many natural food stores have the Meyerberg goat milk but that stuff isn’t really fresh. And, when it comes to goat’s milk, freshness makes a huge difference. The longer it sits in the fridge, the more it takes on that “goaty” flavor that’s okay in a good funky cheese but not something you’d want to pour on your oatmeal.) They are an agritourism operation, which means they have animals (mostly poultry) in pens around the parking lot under the trees, so you can see that they’re in good health and not suffering. They have a decent little produce section with fruits and vegetables from neighboring farms as well as their own. And they’ve rounded the place out into a decent little gourmet/natural food shop, with some European cheeses and organic pasta and so forth.
I liked the store so much that I began to consider staying in the area, even though there’s no ocean here or much of anything else that I’d normally consider an attraction. So I dropped the farm’s zip code into the Airbnb search bar and up came the Creepy Cottage.
Now, those of you who remember the apartment I shared in Worcester with a friend who was born on Halloween night and took that as the basis of her décor style (Hi, Kricket!), you already have an idea how the interior of this place was done. But beyond that, it was a whole cottage, surrounded by big trees, with a yard containing a table and chairs and a grill and a little porch with an Adirondack chair, for a very reasonable amount of money. I put in a request to rent and held my breath. After having two previous cool-sounding rentals vanish before I ever saw them, I was 100% ready for something to go wrong with this one.
But nothing did. On the day I was scheduled to arrive, I rolled up to the place and the host was there, happy to see me and help me get settled in. I’m there now and the place is working out quite well. It has its own little yard, fenced off with a privacy fence, with the side yard done as a tiny graveyard. There’s a coffin-shaped cabinet which was mentioned in the listing as a second bed, but they made it into a closet just for me.
But the really great thing about the Creepy Cottage is its location. While the two rentals before it were in suburbs of the absolutely stereotypical sort, with pretty much nothing within walking distance, this place is located in an absolute sweet spot for someone with my obsessions. It’s technically in Orlando, but on the far northern outskirts, in a relatively undeveloped pocket exhibiting exactly zero presence of the Walt Disney Corporation. Instead, there is an old, modest but well-maintained neighborhood of little cinderblock houses, manufactured homes, and house trailers, each on at least half an acre, with lots of big trees. Within walking distance there are two grocery stores, a laudromat, a pharmacy, and a quite good Jamaican restaurant. Within driving distance, in addition to the aforementioned farm, there are the usual big chain natural food stores, multiple independents and some excellent farmers’ markets. I am eating even better here than I do at home.
But all good things must come to an end. It’s beginning to get buggy. There is a species of no-see-um that just hatched out that is reaallly attracted to human eyeballs. Any day now the city is going to start fogging, as they call it, spraying insecticide everywhere, and I don’t want to be here for that. Besides, they still won’t give the COVID vaccine to people who are just wintering here. This rental ends next week and I’ll be heading home.