When you fly in on a Friday morning and fly out on Sunday morning, fish six hours, and go to two baseball games, you don’t see as much of a place as you’d like. I never visited the Flagler Museum, or stuck my toe in the Atlantic, or caught some weird exotic out of a canal. Part of the point of this exercise is not just fish. I could stay in Houston and not catch fish. Part of the point of this exercise is to get the sense of 50 states. It’s hard to get much sense in two days.
We were terrible spring trainers. We were in West Palm Beach for Astros’ spring training, but we never made it to a game before the second inning. It wasn’t our fault. We made it to the Budget rental line at the Fort Lauderdale airport by 11 am, and the game didn’t start until 1:30, but we stood in line for an hour for a car. The drive’s another hour, and when we got to the new Ballpark at West Palm the signage is horrible. We took two wrong turns before we got to where we could park and that took at least 30 minutes. Then it’s a long walk to the stadium and another long line for ballpark food. Delicious.
This is the first thing I learned about Florida: It’s not just Donald Trump who goes there every weekend. The lines for the rental cars on Friday morning are waiting for you.
We were late to the game on the second day too, and missed an excellent first two innings by McHugh, 1 hit, 1 walk, 5 strike outs. We kept fishing until we were late. Ok, that was our fault.
We stayed at a Bed and Breakfast, Hibiscus House, near downtown, a block off the main drag Clematis. Kris noted that she always feels cheated at Bed and Breakfasts because we never actually get to eat the breakfast. I didn’t find a bakery, but on the way back to the airport we found a good donut shop, Jupiter Donuts, which was neither in nor on Jupiter but near enough to both.
Skip the banana and chocolate. I can’t believe I preferred banana Moon Pies as a child.
We walked down Clematis Street Friday night, top to bottom to a good restaurant, Pistache. I had a martini, and some wine, and a good potato and leek soup which I’d wanted all winter, and the duck breast. I also learned something: everyone in nice restaurants in Florida really is old, as old as me at least. I asked the waitress (who was originally from New York) what we shouldn’t miss. The turtle rescue, she said. She was right, too, we shouldn’t have missed the turtle rescue but we did.
The second thing I learned about Florida: if you’re in Florida, it’s easy to miss the turtle rescue. There’s golf. There’s baseball. There’s fishing.
The third thing? It’s great to feel young again. There are all these old people in Florida and everything is relative.
The next night, after the fishing, after the game, after the two-hour nap and practicing the Sor “Variations on a Theme by Mozart” while Kris slept, we had dinner reservations at the Flagler Steakhouse. It’s easy to see why Henry Flagler is the patron saint of Florida. He came from New York in 1879 with unimaginable amounts of money, a different level of money, and he built the Florida East Coast Railway and the Florida Overseas Railway down the coast, from San Augustine in the north to Key West at the bottom of the world, all to serve his Florida resorts and real estate investments. He was Walt Disney before Walt Disney. He built the Ponce de Leon Hotel in San Augustine. He built Palm Beach to serve the rich and West Palm Beach to serve the not-rich. He built the Royal Poinciana in Palm Beach on the shores of Lake Worth (where the New York lady in yoga pants told us to stop bothering her dog). He built Miami and named it Miami instead of Flagler. He built the Breakers.
We thought about staying at the Breakers. There was no reason to stay at any other resort on Palm Beach, so if we were going to stay on Palm Beach it would be the Breakers. It is still the surviving heart of everything that Florida is: ridiculous, extraordinarily expensive, gorgeous from the Atlantic and at night from the land rimmed in light and shining. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t spend that much money. But I thought eating at the Flagler Steakhouse in the Breakers would be a good compromise. We could get there early, we could walk around and see the hotel, we could admire Flagler’s vision.
We got there early but here’s the thing, the Flagler Steakhouse is across the street on the golf course. It’s part of the resort, it’s just not in the hotel. We only saw the hotel at a distance, like that green light across the water or the Magic Kingdom, and then our Uber driver took us back around the guardhouse and across the street.
As for the Flagler Steakhouse, don’t. Just don’t. We spent $350 on a pretty good steak with a steamed bake potato. I had a martini, and two glasses of wine. I had some corn chowder with bits of lobster. $350 for a steak and baked potato is obscene, even with a martini, and even if service is included. There was sour cream with the potato, so that was good. The place was packed. As our Uber driver said on the way back to our bed and breakfast, the rich are different.
The fourth thing? The rich are different.
I think Henry Flagler might have been proud. I think he reached his audience.
