Thomas Swick’s Seven Wonders of South Florida
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 08.27.07 | 1:50 PM ET
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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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
wholesale car josh 03.05.08 | 3:36 PM ET
Yes, Florida’s “light”, in my opinion, is its #1 feature. Once I moved here, it took 4 or 5 months to get used to the incredible clarity and brightness. It’s just beautiful.
I kind of take it for granted now after 15 years, but I can’t help but be almost overwhelmed with it again as soon as I get off a plane here after visiting the northeast.
It it is true also that nobody seems to talk about it.
karthik cmouli 04.13.08 | 6:29 AM ET
Florida is indeed a beauty that takes so many words to describe it. The one thing that always comes to my mind whenever I think of Florida is the everglades and then there is the hurricane season which would be there soon enough, Florida is unique in so many aspects, and let us not forget teh ever present alligators,
Miami Beach Insurance Lawyer 11.03.08 | 11:28 AM ET
Florida is a wonderful place to go. The beaches, the sun, the people. I would rec. it to anybody who hasn’t come up and I would agree with the sun-sentinel it is one of those wonders that not everyone talks about.
Good article!