A couple of months ago I noticed that we were coming up upon a bit of a season of Civil War reenactments across Florida at various locations. I had wanted to go to one of these for quite a while and I figured I'd go ahead and attend one, and after a bit of research, the best looked like it would be the Olustee battle reenactment way up north near the border of Georgia kind of halfway between Gainesville and Jacksonville.
Apparently, the battle which took place on February 20th, 1864, was the largest Civil War battle fought in the state of Florida. And this reenactment had been going on each year for the past 64 years or so I think. Cool!
I researched the website dedicated to the annual reenactment and I thought that that was itself a historical reenactment, one that evoked the mid 1990s with its web 1.0 ancient design HTML structure. I mean this website looks like it was created on Geocities using Microsoft webpage creator and posted from somebody's 386 SX IBM compatible and displayed using Netscape Navigator. Nevertheless I'm muddled through it and figured I'd make a day of it despite the long drive.
Well it did indeed turn out to be quite a long and arduous drive. Rife with problems from the get-go. I wanted to get there at least by 11:00 a.m. Today in order to see some of the reenactors presentation including a Frederick Douglass impersonator doing a speech about the role of himself in this battle back then. You see, a large contingent of the Union forces during this battle or manned by freed slaves fighting for the Union forces. I certainly needed to get to the battlefield in time for the reenactment battle which was scheduled to start at 1:30. By the way, today's battle is just a random skirmish between the Union and Confederate forces, not necessarily organized exactly the way the Battle of velocity was since that battle takes place tomorrow. But since I'm attending a play in Orlando tomorrow I had to come to this reenactment. The website suggested that if you wanted lesser attended crowds this would be the day to attend anyway so that sounded good to me.
Oh, I forgot to state what I was getting at. I'm dictating this so it's a little scatterbrain and I'm tired since I'm really dictating this not really the day of the event, but the evening of the next day when I'm home, if you know what I mean, I just saved the place using my phone in order to have the date of the post be the day that the battle occurred, oh man what am I saying, anyway...
As I was saying, I needed to get started early so I left the house at 7:00 a.m. Sharp, and as I was closing the door to the house, I noticed it wouldn't lock. Yep. For some reason now my house doesn't lock automatically when I shut the door after I've already locked it, I have to now use my key to lock it from the outside. The problems would continue, especially with little mechanical problems like this, all day long.
Should I have withheld my Farxiga tablet? You betcha. Along the route up there, which Google Maps said should have taken about 3 hours in 45 minutes, I had to stop no less than five times to go to the bathroom. Plus stopping for gas, stopping to check my phone to see the map since I can't read my phone while I'm driving, since I don't know how people can do that, since if I tried it, I would certainly get in a wreck. 5 hours. That's how long it took me to get from Sebring to a Lusty. That's right, a Lusty. That's what my dictation software wants me to write. I'm leaving it because it's funny, but also because take a look at my route on the map below. It's the timeline from Google Maps from a snapshot. You'll notice that apparently, among the various stops along the way in my journey, Google Maps thinks that I stopped at a place called Cafe Risqué. Now I did see a billboard about this on the highway as I passed near the town it was in. Apparently the town it is in, Micanopy, is the town I stopped to get gas. The billboard stated it is a strip joint. Yeah, I don't think I need to see any titties, thank you very much.
The other weird thing that was happening, and I noticed it specifically as I was traveling north on I75, kind of right about from the point of Cafe Risqué onward, was that my AC was going out. Hulk never gave me AC problems before. He's always been flawless. Now, all of a sudden, I actually had to put down the windows, especially on my ride back to Orlando, and let me tell you, it's no fun driving 70 miles an hour in a tiny little car, even with the windows cracked down a little bit. But with Temps even up here in North Florida in the upper 70s, and the interior of my car probably in the mid 80s, there's no way I could just deal with vents alone. Now if hope pulls this shit in say July, oh hell no!
The other thing that was happening was, probably because of my need to pee being so Non-Stop, I also had that old kidney ache issue that I get on long drives. My body just won't let me have a break. But speaking of my body, I kind of did it a little bit of good in that when I did get to the park where the battlefield is, even though I missed the Frederick Douglass presentation, I made it well in time for the battle, but even though I read that there would be a bit of walking from the entrance that the shuttle bus from the parking area dumps you at to the battlefield itself, it didn't give you the scale too well in that it's a pretty good bit of walking, and along kind of woodsy trails. So I got a little bit of a workout. But it was all well worth it because the reenactment was pretty awesome. They do a good job. I would have liked it to be a lot closer up, but, come to think of it, would that be really safe? I mean, they're not using bullets, but they are using black powder. And those bangs were pretty loud when the rifles went off, and the booms were even much louder when the cannon went off. Oh yeah, they had cannon. And horses too. But enough of me telling you about it, see for yourself.
After the battle ended around 3:00, it took me about 4 hours to get down to Orlando, but once at my hotel room, La Quinta Inn by Wyndham at I-drive, I was pleasantly surprised that for $85 a night I got such nice digs.
