Travel Destinations

Driving through the Magnificent Pleasurable Capital of the World at Orlando, I used to be struck by the deliberation that Florida should probably add to the list a planetary designation for human perversity. There are a few things wondrously upside-down about a state to which individuals congregate, supposedly because of its climate as well as normal loveliness, but where most of that attractiveness has been drained and covered in Rooms to Go’s and Scratch and Dent Worlds, and where the majority of residents feel about air-conditioning the way astronauts feel about spaceships.

If you are one of those people who has given up on Florida, I encourage you to venture about an hour and a half north of the Magic Kingdom, into Marion and Alachua Counties, where Orlando’s ravening grid falters and the landscape stops looking like something loaded off a truck. A green edema of hills rises from the coastal flatness. Tire dealerships give way to boiled-peanut stands. Artesian springs the color of glacial ice spill from the earth. Horses that are not on theme-park salaries stalk rolling acreage beside the highway.

South of Gainesville on Route 441, my friend and I passed McIntosh and Evinston, unassuming whistle-stops where Victorian clapboard houses sit alongside trailer parks under such dense canopies of Spanish moss that it looks like someone dragged a squeegee down the view while it was still wet. As dusk ripened, we stopped in Micanopy, a one-boulevard town of aged brick and log buildings, a place so steeped in old-style charm it’s hard to stand on the main drag without a faint anxiety that at any minute movie studio security guards are going to roust you off the set.

While Micanopy surely has one of the highest number of antique shops per capita in the nation, the town is sufficiently rust streaked and mold spangled that the place somehow pulls off the feat of not seeming twee. “This is Florida like it used to be,” said Monica Beth Fowler, the owner and operator of Delectable Collectables, a shop specializing in rare cameos. “It’s one of the few places in the state that hasn’t been ruined yet.” Past Micanopy’s antiques strip sits the Herlong Mansion, a bed and breakfast of commanding elegance – Corinthian columns the size of grain silos, verandas exploding with ferns. But at my friend’s suggestion we’d made plans to stay the night 20 minutes to the east, in the settlement of Cross Creek.

My friend is an editor who lives in North Carolina but who proudly descends from Florida “cracker” stock. In north Florida, “cracker,” a reverent sobriquet for the area’s swamp-dwelling pioneers, is far from an epithet. Cross Creek – home of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the novelist and chronicler of the Depression-era cracker monde who died in 1953 – could probably be described as the Florida Cracker Capital of the World. Our destination was the Yearling Restaurant (“Home of Cracker Cooking”), named after Rawlings’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. A plain, roadside building of sun-scorched boards, the Yearling, we found, was extremely serious about its rustic bona fides. A varnished gator hide, a Confederate flag and a rack of historic outboard motors trimmed the restaurant’s walls. A local blues musician presided in the dining room, crooning to his dobro, while diners tucked into a menu of traditional fare. We ordered the “cracker appetizer plate,” which included fried mushrooms, fried ingots of gator tail, fried green tomatoes and fried frog legs whose girth and musculature would have put a speed skater to shame.

The Yearling’s owners also operate the nearby Lodge that rented Cabins, where we’d booked accommodations for the night. The lodge consists of seven humble cabins arrayed under a hangar of live oak limbs and echoes with the lusty belchings of bullfrogs in the nearby creek. “That’s what’s so great about it out here. This could never be Orlando. You could never get rid of all the banana spiders, palmetto bugs and snakes.” “So awesome,” she said. “It’s the land that time forgot!

Sarah Connor is part of the travel team at FindVacationRentals.com. A directory specializing in vacation homes. The the directory can provide you with a complete comprehensive list of beach vacations and homes throughout Florida.