Orlando via Arcadia... part 2

We decided to journey up to Orlando - about 160 miles up through the central parts of the state, thus avoiding where possible most of the Interstates. As much fun as it is driving on the UK motorway equivalent, maintaining 70 miles per hour and watching that you do not slip below 50mph (a traffic offence), can be very tiring, very boring and keeping a constant alert for traffic merging from your right, lorries that seem to have super engines as they power past you, and the occasional lunatic driver, is a drain.

TomTom Sat Nav is really good here in the US and the speed reminder, traffic updates and other points of interest are eerily heralded by a doom-laden gonging sound.

So we opted for a quiet, leisurely drive up through countryside, following the emergency evacuation route through to Arcadia and beyond. Not that the evacuation route was much use in August 2004 as Hurricane Charley, originally expected to hit Tampa and cross through the State over to Orlando, decided to wobble, made landfall at Port Charlotte, just 18 miles from us, tore up the Peace River, and followed the poor souls who had left their homes in Punta Gorda and were dutifully following procedure and the road to Arcadia.

You may recall seeing the image on the top left of the Arcadia water tower. The hurricane devasted the area with many homes and businesses literally disappearing in the space of minutes.

In some earlier footage I took during that hurricane we witnessed a speed boat that had been parked on a driveway hovering some three or four feet off the ground as the storm took hold before it was zipped across the river and through the pool deck cage some 500 yards away.

Anyway, this is a nice journey on a quiet road, with lovely countryside on either side passing through some small towns (village-size) with their very old Floridian-style houses. We also saw huge cattle ranches (NB., at one stage there was a greater herd of cattle in Florida than there was in Texas and much of the land around our home in Rotonda was once owned by the Vanderbilt family and used as cattle grazing land).

We headed in a north easterly direction passing through interestingly-named places such as:

• Zolfo Springs (population 1642 at 2000 Census)
• Bowling Green (population 2,892 at 2000 Census. Second photo shows the historic train station dating back 1911.)
• Fort Meade (3rd photo shows Christ Church about 1889. Fort Meade is the oldest city in Polk County, dating its origins to 1849 when it was an old military road from Tampa (Fort Brooke) to Fort Pierce during the Indian wars. The 1880s business district was located on old Wire Street (now Broadway), which was a casualty of 4 devastating fires. The Future Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, was stationed at the fort in 1851. The town was burned by Union forces in 1864 and all of the original structures were destroyed, except the 2nd fort which was dismantled in the 1890s. Fort Meade has over 300 hundred homes on the National Register of Historic Places and a handful that date to the late 1800s).
• Haines City and back on to the I-4 to Orlando.