A Free-Reprint Article Written by: Alesha Corwin Article Title: Northcentral Florida: It's The Land That Time Forgot
See TERMS OF REPRINT to the end of the article. Article Description: If you are one of those people who has given up on Florida, I encourage you to venture about an hour and a half north of the Magic Kingdom, into Marion and Alachua Counties, where Orlando's ravening grid falters and the landscape stops looking like something loaded off a truck. Additional Article Information: =============================== 662 Words; formatted to 65 Characters per Line Distribution Date and Time: 2010-02-24 11:00:00 Written By: Alesha Corwin Copyright: 2010 Contact Email: mailto:[email protected] For more free-reprint articles by Alesha Corwin, please visit: http://www.thePhantomWriters.com/recent/author/alesha-corwin.html ============================================= Special Notice For Publishers and Webmasters: ============================================= HTML Copy-and-Paste and TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of Article Are Available at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/c/northcentral-florida-vacations.shtml#get_code --------------------------------------------------------------------- Northcentral Florida: It's The Land That Time Forgot Copyright (c) 2010 Alesha Corwin Find Vacation Rentals http://www.findvacationrentals.com/ Driving through the Fabulous Fun Capital of the World at Orlando, I was struck by the thought that Florida should probably add to the list a planetary title for human perversity. There is something wondrously upside-down about a state to which people flock, purportedly for its climate and natural loveliness, but where most of that loveliness has been drained and covered in Rooms to Go's and Scratch and Dent Worlds, and where most residents feel about air-conditioning the way astronauts feel about spaceships. If you are one of those people who has given up on Florida, I encourage you to venture about an hour and a half north of the Magic Kingdom, into Marion and Alachua Counties, where Orlando's ravening grid falters and the landscape stops looking like something loaded off a truck. A green edema of hills rises from the coastal flatness. Tire dealerships give way to boiled-peanut stands. Artesian springs the color of glacial ice spill from the earth. Horses that are not on theme-park salaries stalk rolling acreage beside the highway. South of Gainesville on Route 441, my friend and I passed McIntosh and Evinston, unassuming whistle-stops where Victorian clapboard houses sit alongside trailer parks under such dense canopies of Spanish moss that it looks like someone dragged a squeegee down the view while it was still wet. As dusk ripened, we stopped in Micanopy, a one-boulevard town of aged brick and log buildings, a place so steeped in old-style charm it's hard to stand on the main drag without a faint anxiety that at any minute movie studio security guards are going to roust you off the set. And while Micanopy surely has one of the highest number of antique shops per capita in the nation, the town is sufficiently rust streaked and mold spangled that the place somehow pulls off the feat of not seeming too commercial. "This is Florida like it used to be," said Monica Beth Fowler, the owner and operator of Delectable Collectibles, a shop specializing in rare cameos. "It's one of the few places in the state that hasn't been ruined yet." Past Micanopy's antiques strip sits the Herlong Mansion, a bed and breakfast of commanding elegance - Corinthian columns the size of grain silos, verandas exploding with ferns. But at my friend's suggestion we'd made plans to stay the night 20 minutes to the east, in the settlement of Cross Creek. My friend is an editor who lives in North Carolina but who proudly descends from Florida "cracker" stock. In north Florida, "cracker," a reverent sobriquet for the area's swamp-dwelling pioneers, is far from an epithet. Cross Creek home of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the novelist and chronicler of the Depression-era cracker monde who died in 1953 could probably be described as the Florida Cracker Capital of the World. Our destination was the Yearling Restaurant ("Home of Cracker Cooking"), named after Rawlings's 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. A plain, roadside building of sun-scorched boards, the Yearling, we found, was extremely serious about its rustic bona fides. A varnished gator hide, a Confederate flag and a rack of historic outboard motors trimmed the restaurant's walls. A local blues musician presided in the dining room, crooning to his dobro, while diners tucked into a menu of traditional fare. We ordered the "cracker appetizer plate," which included fried mushrooms, fried ingots of gator tail, fried green tomatoes and fried frog legs whose girth and musculature would have put a speed skater to shame. The Yearling's owners also operate the nearby Lodge that rented Cabins, where we'd booked accommodations for the night. The lodge consists of seven humble cabins arrayed under a hangar of live oak limbs and echoes with the lusty belchings of bullfrogs in the nearby creek. "That's what's so great about it out here. This could never be Orlando. You could never get rid of all the banana spiders, palmetto bugs and snakes." "So awesome," she said. "It's the land that time forgot!" --------------------------------------------------------------------- Step off of the vacation fast-track of Orlando, Florida, and explore the rural cabin rentals or stay at a rustic bed breakfast inn in North-central Florida. Alesha Corwin writes about travel for: http://www.findvacationrentals.com/ and http://www.findbedandbreakfast.com/ --- END ARTICLE --- Get HTML or TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of This Article at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/c/northcentral-florida-vacations.shtml#get_code ..................................... TERMS OF REPRINT - Publication Rules (Last Updated: May 11, 2006) Our TERMS OF REPRINT are fully enforcable under the terms of: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR: ..................................... *** Digital Reprint Rights *** * If you publish this article in a website/forum/blog, You Must Set All URL's or Mailto Addresses in the body of the article AND in the Author's Resource Box as Hyperlinks (clickable links). * Links must remain in the form that we published them. Clean links should point to the Author's links without redirects having been inserted into the copy. * You are not allowed to Change or Delete any Words or Links in the Article or Resource Box. Paragraph breaks must be retained with articles. You can change where the paragraph breaks fall, but you cannot eliminate all paragraph breaks as some have chosen to do. * Email Distribution of this article Must be done through Opt-in Email Only. No Unsolicited Commercial Email. * You Are Allowed to format the layout of the article for proper display of the article in your website or in your ezine, so long as you can maintain the author's interests within the article. * You may not use sentences from this article as an input for any software that steals sentences from others in order to build an article with software. The copyright on this article applies to the "WHOLE" article. *** Author Notification *** We ask that you notify the author of publication of his or her work. Alesha Corwin can be reached at: [email protected] *** Print Publication Reprint Rights *** If you desire to publish this article in a PRINT publication, you must contact the author directly for Print Permission at: mailto:[email protected] ..................................... If you need help converting this text article for proper hyperlinked placement in your webpage, please use this free tool: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl Would you like to learn how to improve the performance of your article marketing campaigns? Download our F.R.E.E. 108-page Article Marketing Ebook at: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html ***************************************************************** * * This email is being delivered directly to members of the group: * * [email protected] * ***************************************************************** ===================================================================== ABOUT THIS ARTICLE SUBMISSION http://thePhantomWriters.com/ is a paid article distribution service. thePhantomWriters.com and Article-Distribution.com are owned and operated by: Bill Platt 3010 E Raintree Stillwater, Oklahoma USA 74074 Learn more about our article distribution services by visiting: http://thephantomwriters.com/x.pl/tpw/info/article-distribution/index.html The content of this article is solely the property and opinion of its author, Alesha Corwin http://www.findvacationrentals.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX --------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------ *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* To have your article appear in this distribution list, you must absolutely be a client of thePhantomWriters. We offer a paid article distribution service, and this is one of the more than 60 groups where we submit our client articles. To learn more about our program, visit: http://thePhantomWriters.com/x.pl/tpw/index.htmYahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thePhantomWriters/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thePhantomWriters/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
