Paradise Found, Goodland, Marco Island, Florida

For years my normal stop in Goodland has long been Stan’s Idle Hour, usually for a weekday lunch. I have gone on a weekend before, but once was enough. Meanwhile, I’d heard good things about the Crabby Lady a bit deeper in Goodland, so drove over to give it a try. I never made it. Looming before me was Paradise Found.

Now Im a fan of the poet Milton, two of whose familiar lines characterize phrases of my life. The first, from Paradise Lost, is “All Hell broke loose,” an apt description of my early years. The second, from Sonnet 19, captures my current life. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” A parking space suddenly opened up — definitely a Sign — so I pulled in and walked up the side ramp. The water was glimmering ahead and to my right, and to my left an empty stool emptied — another Sign — and beckoned with this view from under a tiki.

Thee was a lot more seating, both indoor and outdoor, and I could have continued on to explore, but who am I to fight against fate?

I duly sat at the bar and ordered a local IPA, a High Five in this case, and made a pretence of looking at the menu before ordering a blackened grouper sandwich with tots. While I sipped my High Five and waited for my sandwich, I chatted with Rich and l Lauren from South Haven, Michigan, a getaway and Lake Michigan beach community. You may have heard of Barden’s Farm Market, which my subsequent research has revealed has two locations, the mother ship in South Haven and an outpost Saugatuck, and is wonderful, well worth a visit. They sell produce grown on the family farm as well as other necessities of life from coffee and all sorts of doughnuts to really beautiful loaves and pastries to soups, sandwiches and (drum roll) biscuits and gravy. Oh, and a garden center, and let’s not forget beer and wine. You should go. There wasn’t much growing in February so they wisely headed to Florida like the rest of Michigan.

We talked about farming (I’m the largest cotton and peanut producer within the District of Columbia) and everything else except, of course, politics. Oh, and my sandwich and tots arrived.

What a beautiful piece of grouper, probably the best fish, caught that morning, seasoned well and cooked just through. It was served on a good grilled roll with tots with that good crunchy salt- and Texas Pete-capturing exterior. Think about eating that sandwich under a tiki. you’re looking out over the water in perfect weather while its freezing back home. You’re getting to know friendly, interesting people who live a very different life from yours on one level that, once you get talking, turns out to be much the same as yours deep down. It doesn’t get much better than that.

That’s why you travel, whether within the USA, to Europe or to some other place. You travel to learn from other people with other perspectives, to relax, read, and think, to see beauty, and to eat delicious local food. You can d all that in Goodland, where the all of the seafood is all local, caught that morning or last night, and where the people are from all over. That’s Paradise Found. Go grab a sandwich and a High Five and find Paradise.

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