15 November 2024
I was out of bed by 6:30 this morning and after getting everything into the Jeep, I killed time until the traffic eased on I-95. I finally got underway (Coastie term) around 9:43 am and actually breezed through the area around Sunrise and Coconut Creek which is always backed up. Of course, by the time I approached Boca Raton, traffic was dead stopped. Only a few times later did the traffic get bad other than the crazy drivers on 95 thinking they were Mario Andretti.
I got to Jacksonville a little after 3, as predicted by my GPS, and after taking a wrong exit due to the lack of an update on the GPS, I finally saw the Doubletree Hilton. When I get to choose my room, I always choose the upper most floor because I don’t want to hear the elephants above me. I’m in room 1016. I have a beautiful view of nothing other than some passé buildings around the hotel.
Speaking of passé, Davis Brown informed me that my old friend Jack passed away last year. Jack was my French teacher at Ole Miss for my first two semesters. He was hell on wheels at the French Lab and told his classes if they missed two labs, they would drop a letter grade. I ended up with Legionaires Disease and in the infirmary for two weeks. He graciously allowed me to make up the labs. Later, he hired me to move some magazines of which he was the editor to another location and paid me generously. He became a life long friend. He retired from Ole Miss and owned a plant nursery in Oxford and when he came to South Florida to buy plants, he would always stay with me. I’ll miss him.
I decided to dine locally at the hotel. They have a Ruth Chris steak house here. I’ve done appetizers at the Ruth Chris in Fort Lauderdale and ate a steak at one in Hollywood years ago. This was a real treat, albeit an expensive one ($188).
I chose the petit filet (medium) with creamed spinach and potatoes au gratin. I tried their blackberry mojito (I think they were out of blackberries and substituted blueberries) and a pinot noir by the glass from Oregon. For desert I had coffee and crème brûlée. The steak was good, the potatoes excellent and the creme spinach just OK. I’ve had better crème brûlée.
For a very fancy restaurant, it was noisy with the wait staff gossiping with one another at the wait station to the point you could hear their conversations. I started to mention it to the manager but decided not to.
The restaurant had a riverside view of the St. Johns River. Jacksonville is noted for the military bases here. At one time, the U.S. sub fleet was in Key West. A local politician got Jacksonville as the home port. The subs have top travel a significant length of the St. Johns River in order to hit the Atlantic where they can deep dive off the continental shelf and hide. The Key West base was better because the continental shelf is closer in the Keys and it takes less time to get underway and hide. Such is politics.
Jacksonville, at one time, had the largest square mile area for any city in the U.S. I assume it is still the same. The city limits just sprawl. The only time I’ve spent any time here was at a Florida science convention. I made a professor very uncomfortable when he showed some slides of some significance and I asked the question how he didn’t know the stuff he was showing was artifacts in the production of the slides. In my defense, they looked like artifacts I had seen in slides before. His answer was “they just aren’t artifacts.
So far, the hotel is quiet but it’s not even 6 pm. It could get louder tonight. There is quite bit of traffic on a road nearby. The hotel could use a remake. The carpet is tired and so are the rooms. However, it was convenient and I get Hilton points – shades of Tom Green.
Tomorrow, I head to Augusta, Ga. I swear, when I was a kid putting together a puzzle of the states of the U.S., Augusta was listed at the capital of Georgia. My Georgia friends insist Atlanta has always been the capital of Georgia. I did a Wikipedia search an apparently that is not true.
Anyway, stay tuned for Augusta!