We stayed two nights in the Crystal River Inn.
It's less than 30 miles from our house. I am not an antiquarian nor a historian but with farms and barns all around, it is easy to imagine the time before my birth when running water, internal combustion engines powered by gasoline, and electricity were not part of daily life in the US. I am thinking of a time when the telegraph and the railroad were all the rage, sure signs that the times and the heavens were smiling on our kind, what with communicating long distances and shipping goods at unbelieveable, unprecedented speeds.
When I look at a building like the Crystal River Inn, I don't immediately think of the internet and email and Google. However, after driving there, bringing in the bags and luggage, one wonders who has been trying to get in touch. What issues of the day, what family matters or political issues have popped up? With the password for the building's wi-fi, we can both check our feeds and messages.
Some people are so harried and so professionally immersed in communications, business deals and emergencies that it can be an enormous relief to be somewhere away from signals and screens and keyboards. It is not so pressing for us, and it is ok to leisurely check what's going on. It is true that we had no television set but had we wanted to, we could have watched Netflix or other services on our devices.
We still used the old-fashioned way to spend time: I read aloud to Lynn. We have been reading "The Almost Nearly Perfect People" by Michael Booth, a look at life in the current Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland. We went through much of the author's comments about Denmark but they got a little repetitious. Lynn's dad had only Finnish ancestors but her mother had Swedish and Cuban/Spanish ancestors with a little Taino Indian from the Caribbean region. Things picked when we switched to the Finnish section. I have read that names that end in "by", like "Kirby", are the section of England that was held for a time by the Danes.
