Growing up in Florida, it was easy to take my home state for granted. Weekends meant spending lazy days at the beach, staying up late to watch a rocket launch from the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, or exploring Castillo De San Marco in Saint Augustine, the oldest surviving masonry fort in the United States. When you’re a kid, you do not think about what’s in your own backyard.
It was not until later that I realized how lucky I had been. At summer camp in middle school, I still remember meeting a kid – from another state that will go unnamed – and thinking, “But how does she get to the best theme parks?”
My own town, Ormond Beach, was about an hour by car from Orlando. Or, as I put it when I was four years old, two episodes of cartoons with commercials. Armed with annual passes, it wasn’t at all unusual for my family to head to the theme parks for an afternoon’s worth of entertainment. They’ve always been the best kind of old-fashioned fun, from riding speed boats and roller coasters to gorging on ice cream and popcorn all day. But I also believe the visits served much more than that – encouraging curiosity from a very early age.
As I became older, I began to discover more of the Florida that exists outside the magic bubble of theme parks, such as when my friends and I were trying (and mostly failing) to surf at Daytona Beach, taking a school trip to the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, or simply cruising down A1A, enjoying the sunshine and looking for our next adventure.
My first trip to Miami and The Florida Keys as a teenager was the beginning of a new appreciation for my home state and everything it offers. I enjoyed succulent vaca frita and vibrant street art in Miami’s Little Havana, the symbolic and cultural capital for Cuban-Americans, visited Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-toed cats at his former home in Key West, and came face-to-face with dolphins at the Dolphin Research Center on Grassy Key.
Now, more than a decade after moving to New York City for college and work, I treasure my opportunities to make new memories when I go back to visit family. And, as it turns out, Florida has just as much to offer adults as it does children and teens. Most recently, I found myself at Blue Spring State Park, a designated manatee refuge on the St. Johns River. On cold days from November to March, you can view hundreds of the gentle sea cows huddling in the spring’s temperate water.
These types of destinations, that lie just off the beaten path, make me fall in love with my home state again and again. When it comes to Florida, it helps to have lived it to know its full potential. I’ve been getting to know Florida for more than 30 years, and it still has the power to surprise and delight me. Florida always has more to teach. From scuba diving at Devil’s Den, an underground cave spring with prehistoric fossils, to an airboat tour of the Everglades, my Florida bucket list keeps growing with me.
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