The Road Not Taken is a wonderful poem written by the great American poet Robert Frost. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken .
The poem lauds the road that is least taken, but that’s the one chosen by Frost. The road that isn’t taken in the poem is the more popular road and I’m here to tell you that it’s possible to get lost on a road that everybody and their brother takes.
The Road Not Taken works on levels that don’t include car travel on I-95 on a trip that starts at the bottom end of the North American continent in Ft. Lauderdale, FL and moves north about two-and-a-half hours to Vero Beach. Once the traveler is off of I-95, she or he faces a crossroads: to take Highway 60 west will take you through the center of the state toward Bartow and eventually Tampa. It’s the way of swamps, sugar cane fields and limestone quarries. To head east takes you to the ocean.
Destination, however, is in the details, and so it is possible to take the wrong road even if (alluding to the poem) the traveler decides to take the road most taken.
On a recent trip to Vero to get a Highwayman painting restored. (The Fort Pierce/Vero area is where the African-American artists were based in the early 1950s and it’s still a place to buy, sell or spruce up the paintings.) Here’s a link that explains the artists. Examples of the art can be found with a simple Google search.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Highwaymen_(landscape_artists)
So after taking the first right at the first gas station on Highway 60 headed east toward the touristy center of town, I ended up on a country road where even John Denver may have felt a bit lost. On the hot, flat asphalt surface of things, it looked straight, but there was no way to turn around without going into a swamp or making a land owner mad. However, on the non-swamp side of the road just past the Keep Out signs are acres of old fast food and gas signs that have been retired, and evidently sold to a collector who doesn’t wish to display them to tourists or even to people who found a nice surprise on the wrong road. (I’m sure it was a guy. He seemed to be enjoying his riding mower, cleaning up his many acres and signs during a first visit to Vero.) At that time I decided not to take photos, but managed to take a few on a subsequent visit where I got lost looking for the wrong road.
If you’ve been wondering where the cartoon chipmunks Alvin, Simon and Theodore have gone, they’re by the side of road with a bunch of other icons of bygone days on a side road in Vero just waiting to bring a smile to the face of travelers who take the most traveled road.
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