Candid Florida

Fairchild Gardens

This Friday is National Public Gardens Day, and no better time to take a stroll – or better yet, take your mother for a stroll – at your favorite public garden. With our temperate and tropical climates, Florida is blessed with some of the most colorful and beautiful gardens in the United States.

Better Homes & Gardens is a sponsor of the event and is providing two free tickets for the following Florida gardens if you go to their website and claim them. The gardens include:

Bok Tower Gardens, Lake Wales
Botanic Gardens at Kona Kai, Key Largo
Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Coral Gables
Heathcote Botanical Gardens, Fort Pierce
John C. Gifford Arboretum, Coral Gables
Lakes Park Botanical Garden, Fort Myers
Milton Gardens of NW Florida, Milton

See slide shows from gardens throughout Florida at Botanical Florida
Find your way to Florida’s Gardens with my iPhone app!

Heading out to sea at Jupiter

In honor of Father’s Day – and to encourage Floridians and visitors to hit the beaches – Governor Charlie Crist has proclaimed this weekend – June 19-20, Father’s Day weekend – as a “free saltwater fishing weekend” for all. No licenses required, but state fishing regulations still apply.

Learn more about fishing for free in Florida this weekend!

After driving down Florida’s Turnpike more than a dozen times in the past few months, I’m getting more and more infuriated at the current effort to make Orlando disappear behind a set of walls that disconnect drivers from what’s around them. I think this will lead to less people getting off the exits to explore – after all, who knows what’s behind those walls? – making the number of casual road-trip stops drop, and will cause trouble in the communities where the walls are going up. People do NOT like walls. They aren’t comfortable. They make you feel trapped. I shot this little video yesterday morning while driving through the construction zone. It’s not pretty, but neither are the walls. Just wanted to give you a sneak peek of what’s going on along the Turnpike.

PS. Just saw my first graffiti on the walls yesterday. FDOT, you want Orlando to be perceived as another faceless drive through a major city like NYC or Atlanta, you are succeeding! This is a terrible, terrible project.

Greetings, and welcome to my new blog! I’m Sandra Friend, author of more than a dozen books on my home state of Florida, and rather than burying posts about my travels in my personal blog, I’m highlighting them here to share what the Sunshine State has to offer as my husband and I roam from one end of the state to another.

In the past week, I’ve driven more than 1,700 miles for a variety of research projects – and to attend a conference – and 95% of that distance was entirely inside the state of Florida. It’s a big place!

So join me on my journeys and see my husband’s perspective when we travel together, through his artwork, at www.robsmithjr.com/blog