A volunteer started digging into an abandoned corner of Fort Zachary Taylor in 1968 and kept at it for years. Three Florida Keys state parks, and what is actually worth the stop at each.
Hugh Taylor Birch started buying Fort Lauderdale oceanfront in 1893 at about a dollar an acre. Four coastal parks from Coral Gables to North Palm Beach, and the stories under them.
A nineteenth-century ship is buried in the beach at Little Talbot Island, and storms keep uncovering it. Four parks between Amelia Island and Ormond Beach, and what is buried in each.
Hurricane Michael cut a new inlet straight through St. Joseph Peninsula in 2018 and turned the park’s tip into an island. Six parks along the Panhandle coast, and what has changed at each one.
Two sisters on six generations of family history, a weekly road trip, a thousand miles of the Florida Trail on foot, and a show that explains whatever is living in your backyard. Seven we actually listen to.
Two independent travel sites, two state resources, a trail database and a free archive of Florida photographs and documents. All six are live, all six are useful, and none of them are trying to sell you a timeshare.
Leonard wrote westerns for two decades before he found Florida. LaBrava won the Edgar. Rum Punch became Jackie Brown and Out of Sight became a Soderbergh film. All three are worth the afternoon.
Hiaasen wrote a Miami Herald column from 1985 until 2021, and the developers and polluters in his novels showed up in the newspaper first. Where to start, and what each of the fifteen is about.
Crystal River is the only place in the United States where getting in the water with wild manatees is legal. It and Rainbow Springs anchor the Nature Coast, one a working bay, the other a former attraction.
In 1970 biologists tracked 14 manatees at Blue Spring. In 2023 the count hit a record 729. Four Central Florida springs within an hour of Orlando, and the reservations now required at three of them.