America's Cheapest Tropical Vacation

As a white northerner, I usually spend the months from November to May in a state of sickly paleness. In September my summer color begins to fade; by late winter any evidence that my skin has ever seen the sun has vanished. By March, a glimpse at my exposed midriff might cause temporary blindness. But not this year. This year I took a tropical Christmas vacation.

At first, I was worried about the cost. As a freelancer, my cash flow hovers right around zero – a good month is one in which I do not actually spend more than I make. But my boyfriend Josh, the consummate coupon clipper, managed to find us round trip fares to Fort Lauderdale on Spirit Airlines for $36 a piece. Throw in a dirt cheap car rental and a few free places to stay courtesy of CouchSurfing.com (an amazing network - if you haven’t checked it out, you really should), and you’ve got America’s Cheapest Tropical Vacation.

We left Philadelphia on the morning of an ice storm, and by late afternoon, we were picking up our rental car in an all-stucco strip mall with palm trees. Minus the trees, the place could have been anywhere in America. An endless succession of Starbucks, Office Depots, Taco Bells, Burger Kings and Popeyes chains lent a kind of treadmill feel to our drive to Boynton Beach, where our first night’s couchsurfing hosts lived.

The rental car’s satellite radio system, unburdened of any sense of place, added to the feeling that the natural landscape and climate were only the backdrop for a trip not to South Florida, but to Mainstream America, a place I am aware of but do not often visit. I guess that’s what happens when you get rid of your car, stop watching TV and listening to commercial radio, stop shopping at big box stores and supermarkets, and never go to malls or theme parks. Do that for a couple of years, and you’re bound to feel like a foreigner.

But later in the week, as we descended into the Florida Keys, everything started to change. Instead of marveling at the essential sameness of everything in America, I started to wonder how the same country that contains Philadelphia could also contain these chilled out, tropical islands. We stopped at a fruit stand selling giant navel oranges and Florida grapefruits three for a dollar and added the fruits to our stash of cheap vacation food – PB and J, bagged nuts, and a giant log of salami.

Our couchsurfing hosts in the islands were a woman named Linda and her husband Kevin. Every night during our stay, they made a fire in their front yard in a fire pit circled with beach chairs. After a day at the beach soaking up the winter sun, we all sat around the fire drinking red wine and eating takeout pizza and grilled shrimp. Several times a night Kevin would grab one of the beach cruisers parked in the front yard and take the dog out for a moonlight run down to the water. “I get antsy, you know, and that’s when I’ve gotta take Marley out for a bike ride.” One morning, he lent us the bikes and gave us directions to an unmarked trail that headed into the middle of the mangrove forest. “You ditch the bikes and walk back into the mangrove, and you feel like friggin’ Ponce de Lee-on,” he told us.

I’m back in Philly now, only a few hundred dollars poorer, and trying to remember why it is that I live here instead of, say, Miami Beach. My tan lines are already fading (and thanks to skin cancer paranoia and high SPF sunscreen they weren’t that great to begin with), but I think they’ll be enough to get me through this winter.