OF PORTABLE BUNGALOWS—OF THE RHEUMATIC DAIRYMAN—OF THE LITTLE OLE TRUCK—OF SIMPLE PLEASURES AND LOW EXPENDITURES
THE tin-canner spends, for his winter of travel, about the same amount of money that a seasoned Palm Beach mixer frequently spends in a couple of days. This isn’t exaggeration, either.
On the road between Miami and Palm Beach I encountered a commodious portable bungalow lumbering noisily along in the general direction of Palm Beach at the rate of about fifteen miles an hour. It filled the entire road, which was nine feet wide at that point. There are many stretches of fine macadamized road in Florida which are exactly nine feet wide, so that when two machines pass each other, one or both of them has to take to the ditch. The reason for such peculiar road-building is supposed to be due to the fact that the road-engineers took a look at the surrounding country, decided that nobody would ever be willing to live in it, and figured that all traffic along the road would run in only one direction—north. They were mistaken, as people usually are about the development of Florida.
At any rate, this portable bungalow filled the road, and it continued to fill the road until it found a good hard place beside the road that would permit it to get out of the way without tearing itself to pieces. It had a thermometer hanging beside its back door in an attractive manner, and three neighborly-looking people were sitting placidly on its glassed-in front porch. Across the base of the front porch, in large gold letters, was painted the owners’ address, Bellevue, Ohio, from which fact one might suspect that the owners were not persons who were striving to hide their lights beneath a bushel, or who would shrink timidly from publicity.
When questioned, the suspicion became a certainty. The owners of the portable bungalow proved to be typical tin-can tourists, equally ready to share with you their last tin of Norwegian sardines or Chicago baked beans in the Boston manner, or to furnish you with concise and intimate information concerning their own or their neighbors’ business and family affairs from the panic of 1907 down to the present day.
The owner of the portable bungalow was a dairyman near Sandusky, Ohio, who had grown tired of developing rheumatism, chilblains and a grouch during the long winter months, and had decided three years before to spend the winter in Florida. He had enjoyed his first winter so much that he had persuaded a couple of friends to make the trip with him during the second winter; and this winter there were two other couples in his party. The other four people traveled ahead in a little sedan; while he and his wife and his eighteen-year-old son pounded along behind in the ole truck. “Yessir, this house here is nothing but our ole delivery truck with a camping top put on it, and she certainly is the greatest ole truck you ever saw! Why, my gracious, she’ll just go through anything, this ole truck will. Why, coming through the Everglades this ole truck ran into....”
That is one of the hall-marks of the simon-pure tin-can tourist. No matter how battered and dilapidated his automobile may be, it has qualities which place it above all other cars—even above other and newer cars of the same make. It can extricate itself from thicker mud and from deeper sand than other automobiles. Its feats of endurance are super-automotive. They verge—to hear the tin-canner tell it—on the miraculous. After the tin-canner has dwelt for some time on the almost-human intelligence of the little ole car, one thinks of it as standing up on its hind wheels and honking with delight when its master says a kind word to it.
The dairyman’s portable bungalow, which would slough its skin with the advent of spring and return to its less romantic duties of trucking milk, contained a portable stove, countless canned things, a fully equipped sink and kitchen cabinet, three hammocks, bedding for seven people, and a phonograph, to say nothing of numerous odds and ends like chairs, dishes, pans, suit-cases and what-not.
In the party that used this portable bungalow as a base there were, as I have said, seven people. The seven of them had started from near Sandusky on the twenty-second of November, worked down to the west coast of Florida, lingering at the larger and better resorts, crossed over to the east coast and were slowly working back up through Palm Beach and Ormond. I met them on the eighth of February, so that they had been on the road for two months and a half. The expenses were borne equally by all of the travelers, except the dairyman’s son, who worked out his keep by doing the dirty work around the cars. Each of the other six chipped five dollars apiece into a general pool as money was needed. In the two and one-half months a grand total of five hundred and ten dollars had been chipped in; and this sum covered the total expenditures of the trip—gasoline for both automobiles; inner tubes, tires and repairs for both automobiles; street-car fares when needed; food for seven people; and movies whenever the spirit and the movies moved together. This meant an average of seventy-three dollars apiece for two and one-half months’ travel in the sunny South, or almost exactly a dollar a day apiece. Such an expenditure contrasts startlingly with expenditures in the big resorts, where one week’s expense for a man and his wife may easily cause a thousand-dollar bill to degenerate into a two-ounce package of chicken-feed.
The dairyman declared that to travel in the way he was traveling cost him about one-third as much as it would have cost him to travel to Florida in trains and to live at hotels and boarding-houses. From this statement it can be seen that one doesn’t necessarily have to be a millionaire in order to spend a winter in Florida.