Road Trip

Observations from the Superslab

Hi all.

I am just back from an epic road trip down and up the East Coast. I live outside Boston; I’ve got family all the way down in South Florida in the Palm Beaches.

I head south just about every year. My aunt lives there in a retirement community, and she is getting up in years. I head down to check in, make sure no handyman work needs to be done, and putter around South Florida for a few days.

I am a professional driver by trade, so naturally what do I do for vacation? I drive. We’ve got a longstanding flight plan. It takes two days to get to Palm Beach from here; two 700-mile days with an overnight stop in Selma, NC. (Near Smithfield).

Sometimes the trip is easy; sometimes it is not. I had a mixed bag southbound, with pouring rain and horrific traffic from just outside NYC all the way down to Fredericksburg, VA. Yes, you read that right.

But I noticed something curious the further south I got. I-95 is the aorta of the East Coast. Travel, tourism, industry, and trucking and transport are the lifeblood of this superhighway. It was strangely deserted. So much so, that I started counting trucks along the way. I saw plenty of local trucking; movers, delivery, and the like. But the usual long-haul names? Few and far between. If you drive - you know them. There was only one Schneider International truck on the road that I saw THE ENTIRE TRIP. No Old Dominion, A. Duie Pyle, Great Western, Mayflower, literally none of these things.

I did see plenty of Amazon, though. It’s almost as if we’re in some kind of trade war, or something.

I’ll tell you what I found more disconcerting - I visited a number of tourist haunts in South Florida. My background is in this industry; I was a tour conductor and bus driver in Boston for seven years before I burnt out and walked away. (A story for another day.) I went to a minor league ballgame in Jupiter (Palm Beach Cardinals.) I walked up, $10 general admission, and the park was mostly deserted. Which was too bad, it was a fun game.

I went out to Palm Beach to tour my father’s old stomping grounds at the Flagler Museum, which was the Whitehall Hotel long, long, ago. Both my father and grandfather worked there as musicians, but I digress. Only a handful of people were visiting on that day. I drove to the main shopping thoroughfare of Worth Avenue, which if you don’t know is Newbury Street, Rodeo Drive, Bond Street, and Fifth Avenue all rolled into one - with the added benefit of a beach at the end of the block.

I got on-street parking in the middle of it all. Granted, it’s the end of the season, but it struck me as rather odd and all too easy.

And then there’s Disney. We are all longtime and bigtime Disnerds in my family, so I can’t not drive to Florida and not go - even solo.

Disney Springs didn’t seem to have the same issues that Palm Beach did; it was reasonably full, although I did visit during daylight hours when most of the crowds would be in the parks. Nighttime was as busy as it always is.

But I was struck by how empty the park I visited was. Granted, it was pouring rain all that morning, but nevertheless I rope-dropped DAK. They were having a “soft opening” that morning, so I strolled in at about 7:40 am. At one point, I was standing on a major walkway between two lands (Asia & Africa), and I was the only person in sight. Not even a cast member. All the things I wanted to ride that day were walk-ons. I did not wait more than 15 minutes for any single attraction. On a Saturday in May.

Sure it was great for me personally, but I was horrified by it. This seems to be the elephant in the room, and maybe even the canary in the coal mine. Tourism to these United States is stone, cold, dead. Destroyed by ineptitude and demagoguery. I wouldn’t blame anyone from a sensible country if they didn’t want to come here. After all, how many foreigners visited Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union during their heyday?

I will leave you with a final thought - I saw more trucking and traffic heading northbound on the way home, but I again spent time dodging the most dangerous vehicle on the roads.

Consider the Recreational Vehicle. Many of these are truly monstrous, and I saw at least two that were legit converted MCI Motorcoaches. A vehicle that I drive professionally.

I needed two months of training, a medical exam, and had to upgrade my license to a Commercial Driver’s License (Class B) with Airbrake and Passenger endorsements just to drive a tour bus legally on the streets of Boston.

Grandpa that has never driven anything bigger than a Toyota Camry can take that beast on the road on a normal Class D license with zero training and zero experience.

Does that seem right to you?