I'm sure you're not green with envy

This blog is now infinitely more green than I care to acknowledge. I've been re-writing the html in the template for an hour and each time I say to myself, "Self, now would be a good time to stop because you are obviously making extremely poor color and format choices," I end up ignoring that voice and chugging along with the insanity. Anyway, sorry it's so ugly. I don't have the energy now to look at html tags for one more second. The greenery will have to do for now. Oy vey.

On to lighter and brighter (and hotter) subjects... the man and I took a drive down past Key Largo today. We thought it would be nice to take a semi-local road trip and get out and walk around a few cute, little beach towns. The weather was beautiful (albeit scorchingly hot) for a drive and it would be a fun thing to do together that required very minimal cash, which is good because that's just how much cash we have. Packed up the cooler with ginger ale and some nectarines and we were off. We drove for a couple of hours and then realized that there really aren't any cute little beach towns until you get the whole way down to Key West - which we weren't going to see because it was another hour and a half from where we decided to turn around. So, we got down past Islamorada and flipped a bitch to head back north. Along the way noticed that the scenery went from urban (where we started - our neighborhood) to suburban (the nice, wealthy areas just south of Miami proper - lots of new stores and malls... malls!), to not so nice suburban (old stores, smaller buildings with painted-on signs, definitely no malls, lots of folks on bikes - I fully realize that people on bikes does not equate to not so nice neighborhoods, it's just a Miami thing, you have to see it to understand it. I'm not talking physically fit people or environmentally conscious people, I'm talking shirtless, jobless, socially repressed people), to desolate, to farmland (lots of citrus groves, very cool to see), to desolate again, to fishing village, to rich fishing village, to "sport fishing capital of the world" as the sign in Islamorada told us. Or was it Tavernier?

It was an interesting progression to watch. It's strange that you can basically track the money. You can see it ebb and flow like the tide just outside your car window as you drive south from Miami. In the city itself the money isn't that abundant. But, head south just a bit and it's everywhere. The malls, the car dealerships, the new buildings all around, and the abundance of white people - no, really - sometimes you can tell where the money is by where the white folk are. Just not the two white folk who live here. Ahem. Whatever... so, you see the money just south, then you leave the Miami metro area and the money backs off again. Don't know where it went, but it certainly wasn't sitting right outside the car like it was all through Coral Gables. Then you hit the farmland and the money is there in the form of the crops and the citrus on the trees, but not in the form of development and certainly not in the hands of the farmers themselves (don't get me started on the small family farmer and how corporate farms are pushing them out to a slow, cold death, that's another post...). You get to the fishing villages and there's a little money there, but you have to get closer to the Keys for it to really well up around you. The boats get bigger, the homes get more extravagant, and the money practically sticks it's tongue out at you as you drive through. You should have seen some of the boats down there. They're beautiful. Maybe some day I'll vacation there. For now, a day trip suits me just fine.