Thomas Swick’s Seven Wonders of South Florida

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel recently named its readers’ picks for the seven wonders of the region. They included, predictably, the Florida Everglades, Walt Disney World and the Florida Keys. On Sunday, travel editor Thomas Swick named seven other wonders, and his was just the kind of quirky list we like.

Among the wonders making his top seven: I-95 (“a geographical and socioeconomic divide, separating beaches from flatlands, downtowns from suburbs, main streets from strip malls, celebrity chefs from cheap ethnic restaurants”); the absence of a symphony orchestra; and, my favorite, the light.

Writes Swick of that final pick: “Everybody raves about it in the south of France, while hardly anybody talks about it in the South of Florida. True, Van Gogh and Cezanne never captured it, but Clyde Butcher has. You awake in the morning and open your eyes to a startling clarity. In midafternoon of the hottest, stickiest summer day the sky is still blue, the clouds obese (more overlooked wonders). And then in the evening, as the sun dips low, the world is reborn in high definition.”

Related on World Hum:
* Seven Wonders of the Shrinking Planet

Photo by minds-eye via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

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