The first manned lunar landing took place on July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong and the crew of Apollo 11 made that historic leap into history almost 40 years ago. That event is always linked in my memory to the warm Florida darkness of Cross Creek. It was there in that little village between Lake Lochloosa and Lake Orange that I stopped my car by the side of the road among huge old oaks draped with Spanish moss and listened to the historic event on the car radio.
The full moon was in the eastern sky. The darkness of this central Florida place made the lunar surface seem eerily bright and close. The moonlight bathed the old Florida cracker house across the road, the house where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived when she wrote The Yearling and Cross Creek. As I looked at the moon and heard the crackling words of Neil Armstrong, I imagined I could hear the faint clicking of her typewriter. The throaty croaking of frogs and the squawking of fishing night birds drifted in the sultry air.
The contrast between the modern accomplishments of the space program and the unchanged old natural feeling of Cross Creek has remained in my mind as the turning point in Florida's headlong rush into development and over population during my adult life. I had graduated just three years earlier from the University of Florida in nearby Gainesville.
Aeronautical engineering was a very popular program in those heady years, but I chose civil engineering and have spent my career designing and building things all over the State, things that have changed the face of Florida forever.
The building above is The Yearling restaurant in Cross Creek. For many years, with some interruptions, this quaint dining place served thousands of hungry Gator fans who would stop in after a University of Florida football game in Gainesville on their way back to Orlando, Tampa, and other places south. Gator tail and cooter were always on the menu, along with catfish and mullet.
For more information about Cross Creek and The Yearling see Florida Backroads Travel.
The full moon was in the eastern sky. The darkness of this central Florida place made the lunar surface seem eerily bright and close. The moonlight bathed the old Florida cracker house across the road, the house where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived when she wrote The Yearling and Cross Creek. As I looked at the moon and heard the crackling words of Neil Armstrong, I imagined I could hear the faint clicking of her typewriter. The throaty croaking of frogs and the squawking of fishing night birds drifted in the sultry air.
The contrast between the modern accomplishments of the space program and the unchanged old natural feeling of Cross Creek has remained in my mind as the turning point in Florida's headlong rush into development and over population during my adult life. I had graduated just three years earlier from the University of Florida in nearby Gainesville.
Aeronautical engineering was a very popular program in those heady years, but I chose civil engineering and have spent my career designing and building things all over the State, things that have changed the face of Florida forever.
The building above is The Yearling restaurant in Cross Creek. For many years, with some interruptions, this quaint dining place served thousands of hungry Gator fans who would stop in after a University of Florida football game in Gainesville on their way back to Orlando, Tampa, and other places south. Gator tail and cooter were always on the menu, along with catfish and mullet.
For more information about Cross Creek and The Yearling see Florida Backroads Travel.
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