Category: Tacky Florida

they paved paradise and put up a fake cellular tree tower

whbeebe
That big fake artificial Christmas tree

My wife and I drove to Jacksonville on Sunday to check on family. On the way up we saw this huge structure near the Costco on west 295. On the way back down that same section of expressway we stopped to fill up with gas at that same Costco. As I drove out to finally head back to Orlando I stopped briefly and grabbed a few “snaps” of this structure. It is indeed a cellular tower, decked out with some of the biggest artificial Christmas tree limbs I’ve ever seen. Somebody must have thought that was a good idea. I don’t know why as the area around the tower is expressway and businesses, in this instance an emergency care center. I guess somebody thought an unadorned cellular tower would upset the critically ill patients coming into the emergency care center.

I mean, it looks like they ran out of money for fake tree limbs and stopped about a third of the way down from the top.

Closeup of the top showing the individual cellular antennas, and all those fake tree limbs

retirement reveries

whbeebe

You’re looking at Apple Maps on a typical weekday morning. All that orange is slow moving traffic, and the red indicates all those roadways with stop-and-go, mostly stopped, traffic. The biggest traffic problems are all over I-4, the major expressway that’s been under expansion and construction for about a decade now. A lot of the expansion is finished, but the traffic problems are still as bad as before, if not worse, than when this construction started. At least with most of the construction finished up and the roadway now running straight and true, it’s not as horrific as the late twenty-tens. But still. The last major piece is the completion of pay-as-you-go express lanes that run down the center. Orlando already has a large number of toll roads (408, 414, 417, 429), along with the Florida Turnpike that runs through Orlando from Ocala down to Miami. And to really add insult to injury, the 528, which runs from I-4 east to the Space Coast has a full toll road with even more expensive express lanes in the center.

As I sit with my coffee and look at this I give thanks that I’m retired and no longer running a commute anywhere. And I do that many a morning. One day I’ll stop doing this, but I want to keep this small vicarious action up as long as I have the least little feelings about part time work in retirement.