Pete's Cabins

I'm comfortably ensconced in a charming little establishment along the gulf coast in the Florida panhandle called "Pete's Cabins'. I stopped here mostly out of morbid curiosity. To describe the place as decrepit and ramshackle would be doing an injustice to the true dumps and dives of this world. I had paused at the side of highway 98, the Gulf Coast Highway, to get a cup of coffee from Tami's Cafe and Wine Bar.  I asked the girl at the counter about a decent, cheap place to stay, and she recommended Pete's, just around the corner and down the block. "Don't let appearances fool you" she had said. When I walked over I had to wonder if she had meant the appearance of the Cabins, or of Pete? Pete looked like he washed up here in the 60's and hadn't had a shave or haircut since. The cabins looked like they had washed up here about the same time as Pete, and had received even less maintenance than Pete, at least from the outside. But when he showed me the inside of one it was clean and tidy, the carpeting and bedding was of a far more recent vintage than it had been in many of the places I had stayed over the last couple of months, and at $30 a night the price was right, so I booked a night. After the first night I decided to stay another, and if I didn't have plans to meet Gilles for Beer on Friday night I'd be here for a couple more.

It comes with high speed internet "Just run over to the cafe, their internet is on 24 hours a day". Breakfast "Just run over to Tami's, she has a dynamite breakfast!" Hot water, well, warmish water, well, okay, tepid water, as long as nobody else runs the water at the same time, but at $30 a night what do you expect? There was no television, no microwave, and no fridge, but I moved my cooler into the room and plugged in the adapter thereby providing my own fridge.

"You're lucky!" Pete declared. "I'm just about to shut down for the season!"

"Aren't you just about to hit the busy season?" I asked.

"Exactly!" he replied. "Too many people! Too much work!"

Pete doesn't just rely on the income from the cabins to provide a living, he's also a farmer, of sorts, on the side, as it were. Actually pretty literally on the side, when I opened the blinds next to the bed there was evidence of Pete's latest crop against the side of the cabin poking up above the windowsill. No wonder he doesn't want people around this time of year. Pete saw me looking and gave me a look that said "Don't you dare! I'll have to charge you extra!"

I think Pete and I are going to get along just fine.

I left Eloy last Thursday morning after the side trip to Utah, drove across Arizona in the rain - it has rained lots there this year, the place is so green I wouldn't have recognized it if I didn't know where I was - passed through New Mexico in winds so high the Highway Patrol set up checkpoints to order 18 wheelers and SUV's off the road, and crossed the endless Texas desert. I visited the Alamo and RiverWalk in San Antonio, and found both so jammed with people I gave up and went to sleep in my hotel room, returning to take pictures of the Alamo without tourists in the way shortly before dawn. The plan was to head for the Gulf Of Mexico to do some kite surfing but the weather was crap so I kept going, stopping at Spaceland outside Houston to do some jumps, but they had been fighting a losing battle with the weather all day so I kept going to Slidell, just outside New Orleans. A day in N.O. prowling the French Quarter (my kinda place! the bars are open at 10 in the morning and the bands start playing at 11!) a walk through one of those really cool cemetery's, a tour of some of the worst neighborhoods still not recovered from hurricane Katrina, and after 2 days I was gone, headed for Florida.

I guess Pete was pretty serious about shutting down for the season. When I returned after spending the day at the beach drinking beer and flying my kite he was pulling out the screws that held up his sign. "Just in case anybody gets a notion to drop by."

I'm heading over to "Tami's Tapas Bar" for dinner, coincidentally located right next door to a cafe with a similar name, it's Nacho Night! If the Quesadillas I had for dinner last night are any indication I should waddle out the door many hours later burping and farting up a storm, whether from the nachos or the oversize $3 draft I don't know, nor will I care.