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It rained over night and drizzled off and on through the day per the forecast which had also said there would be isolated flash flooding along the pan handle. The news tonight proved that to be correct and much of the road we travelled on is now flooded and impassable. Given we have to head to the airport tomorrow morning for our flight to Puerto Rico we are feeling a little bit lucky :-) We took the scenic, non highway route entailing more long bridges, gorgeous coastal towns then through forested areas with swampy ground either side before it all slowly gave way to the city of Tampa. Post Hurricane Katrina and the oil spill the govt is trying to monitor the ocean; the water and the organisms that live in it. There are a number of monitoring stations along the Gulf manned by passionate scientists, guardians of the ocean :-) we stopped and chatted to one such ocean warrior and if he's anything to go by it's in good hands. We found ourselves once again going through areas thick with churches, many many churches in some towns from mainstream thru Pentecostal to raving loony. Holy rollers and right wing ravers were on radio and everywhere there were more highly visible gun shops than we'd come across before incl when in Texas! Like other days we passed quite a few mobile homes sales yards, smallish 3 bed 1 bath demountable houses from about $25K. They actually looked pretty good, no idea re land prices but they'd cost a lot more in Aust. Many of the small towns we went through are either dead or nearly so, most businesses are either closed down or have signs up desperately trying to sell them off, the for sale signs look pretty old so we are guessing there aren't too many takers. The few places that look like they're doing well are pubs, the always present cheque cashing places & thrift shops. There is the occasional bigger town that looks like it's doing better complete with the usual fast food places and chain stores. Most of these towns theatre doing ok have at least one major employer eg the town that had a dolomite mine. We passed numerous signs warning about bears but we've still not sighted any, about all we can lay claim to wildlife wise is numerous dead smaller animals, possibly racoons(?) The casino signs have been replaced by ads for help with sinkhole restoration so we assume the recent episode of a resort going into a sink hole is a far from an uncommon incident in Florida. Closer to Tampa the bill boards were all for plastic surgeons & ambulance chasers, if a foreigner can judge a society from its advertising we are getting an interesting idea of what the USA is all about lol At some point along the way we passed some radiation detectors then found out why when we came across a nuclear power plant. Pete is doing really well with him doing all the driving but he still confuses the indicators and the windscreen wipers lol Not sure why but he other drivers cant understand the code, when the wipers go on despite no rain it means he is turning lmao We are loving the petrol prices, it varies but for most part it's approx 90 c/ lt
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