Our final time in The Villages started with a golf cart ride about 4 miles through town to TooJays for breakfast. Here’s my take. Comfortable enough, but you need to hold on as you round corners. Slow (has a monitor that won’t let you go over 23 mph). Noisy. But it gets you there.

Our friends have 2 cars and a cart. But it’s the cart they use. Put on it over 10,000 miles per year, they say. Go figure.

At any rate, TwoJays was very busy, crowded with Don Ameches and Angela Lansburys. A comic scene, we both thought. But top quality oatmeal.

Moving out, avoiding all superhighways, we felt we had left Middle Earth and returned to the home planet. We went through Ocala quickly, surprised to see so many beautiful and prosperous looking horse farms. Didn’t quite look like KY, but pretty close.

North of Ocala, on our way to Gainesville, we passed the turnoff for Micanopy (accentuate the first syllable). Not sure why I found it crucial to go to Micanopy, but I did. We saw several of its 600 residents, fewer than when it was thriving in the 1800s. Interesting old brick buildings, a coffee shop which serves espresso made from Cuban coffee beans (highly recommended – we had had a brief discussion about Cuban coffee with someone cleaning the condo hall in West Palm Beach), and a selective and affordable antique store. We also saw a placque dedicated to Moises Levy, an early Moroccan born Jewish merchant.

This was interesting for two reasons. First (for close readers, and if memory serves) was the same name of the Jewish merchant so prominent in Manning SC (yesterday seems so far away). Second, this Moises Levy was actually Moises Yulee Levy,the father of David Yulee (he dropped his last name), the first Jewish US senator.

A Mexican lunch at a walk up to the window place in Gainesville. A stop at the Florida Museum of Natural History, with their big, big butterfly rain forest building, and their very large and sophisticated lepidopterist laboratories, as well as a spider exhibit (The butterflies were in the open….but not the spiders. Call the SCLU.) And mastodon and mammoth skeletons, enormous jaws of extinct sharks and so on.

Back in the car. Cows and cows and cows and goats. And onto Jekyll Island where Priceline got us a nice room at the Hampton Inn and where the Hampton Inn recommended the Driftwood Bistro and even drove us there and back.