As someone who travels for a living, I’m used to following my own whim, doing what I want when I want to do it. Unsurprisingly, things get complicated when you have a 100-year-old in tow. In October, I went to Tallahassee for the third year in a row to stay with my aunt Josie while my cousin and her husband took a much-needed vacation. For the third year in a row, my autumn visit coincided with a hurricane. My father, ever the jokester, said I must be the magnet. In any case, the hurricane is how I ended up in Amelia Island with my 100-year-old aunt.
Evacuating Hurricane Michael
In 2016, Hurricane Hermine downed trees and knocked out power for a couple of days. Last year’s Hurricane Irma hit the Keys hard and seemed headed right toward Tallahassee before whirling up central Florida (I was prepared for the challenge: coolers stocked with ice; drinking water; simple meals; flashlights and lanterns; water in the tub for flushing toilets). But this year’s Michael was quickly developing into a monster hurricane, and because Tallahassee is a forest of trees, it was deemed best if Josie and I hightailed it to Amelia Island, on Florida’s Atlantic east coast.
The challenges and rewards of traveling to Amelia Island with my 100-year-old aunt
There are worst places to be a hurricane evacuee. But I also knew that being in a vacation destination with a 100-year-old could hardly be called a vacation, at least not in the way I was used to. In some ways, traveling with a centenarian is a lot like traveling with a toddler. You might have a great excursion planned, only to have it upended by an accident, upset stomach, or the intense desire to lie down and take a nap. I’m also convinced old people require a lot more stuff. Walker. Wheelchair. Shower seat. Toilet seat. Adult pull-ups. Wipes. Wig. Creams for itchy skin, dry skin. First aid for papery-skin cuts and bruises. Special foods. Nightlights. And pills galore, for chronic illness, for sleeping, for pain, for diarrhea, and then for constipation. Some people also need oxygen and other vital equipment.
Then there’s the speed of a centenarian. Josie is incredibly fit and able
for a person her age and a delightful conversationalist, but virtually everything is done in slow motion. Getting dressed is a painstaking effort. Brushing of teeth requires sitting down. Every meal takes an hour, if not an hour-and-a-half or two. I’m not sure we could ever get out into the world before 10am, even if our lives depended on it.
It’s a challenge traveling with a person in a wheelchair. Although Josie is adept with a walker indoors, we use a fold-up wheelchair for out and about, which requires lifting, wrangling, dealing with uneven sidewalks and door sills and constantly looking for handicap access.
Luckily, people were amazingly friendly on Amelia Island. Everywhere we went, people opened doors for us, addressed Josie directly, asked how she was doing, wished her a good day. I could never refrain from boasting her age, which always brought the same reaction: eyes growing wide, looking at her anew like she was a survivor of the Titanic.
Of course, Josie wasn’t always 100. Two years ago she was only 98, when there were more frequent glimpses of the small and spry aunt I remembered from my childhood, a woman with a loud and raspy voice, brightly painted nails and a cutting sense of humor.
When visiting my aunt Jean (my mom’s sister) in 2016 on her horse ranch in central Florida, about a 90 minute drive from Tallahassee, I told Josie that Jean has a breeding stallion. “They used to bring mares to the ranch to be bred,” I said, “but now they just ship sperm all over the country.”
“That’s no fun,” was Josie’s response.
But the past two years have brought relentless, inevitable and expected mental and physical decline, bringing with them more confusion and repeated questions of where we were going (being whisked away from the comfort of her Tallahassee home to Amelia Island didn’t help), where we were, who was I again, and why hadn’t I brought her breakfast when she had eaten it only an our ago, punctuated with moments of remarkable clarity. She laughs at the absurdity of being old, trying to spear food with a shaking hand, me playing charades when she isn’t wearing her hearing aids. Every once in a
while she relates something from her childhood or past that I never knew, such as riding a jinrickshaw in the 1920s when her family changed ship in Asia (Japan?) on their way to the Philippines (my grandfather was a military doctor, so they moved around a lot). And she is still funny as hell.
“I’ll pray for you when I get to heaven,” she told me once just before taking a nap. “Is there anyone else I should pray for?”
“How about my dad?” I suggested.
“Ok,” she replied. Then, with her eyes closed, she added, “He needs it. A lot.”
What makes being with her so rewarding is that she is cheerful, the ultimate sweet old lady, only occasionally giving in to the aches and pains that must visit her body continuously. That I should be so gracious. She’s forever grateful for what I do for her, thanking me every day for being there, but she gives me so much more.
Tooling around Tallahassee
Josie used to work for Pan Am with the bonus of free flights, and her enthusiasm in getting out into the world hasn’t diminished. In Tallahassee we have tooled around downtown Cascades Park, taken the circular path around Lake Ella many times, explored the Tallahassee Museum with its 1880s pioneer farmstead and native wildlife habitats (we especially enjoyed watching the red wolves) and seen the former plantation home Goodwood Museum and Gardens. The Tallahassee Automobile Museum has an amazing collection of much more than its 160-some automobiles, though we were disappointed when we couldn’t find one from her birth year. Our favorite outing was to Wakulla Springs, which I remember visiting as a kid, with its cruise up the river followed by lunch in the lodge’s old-fashioned dining hall.
Seeing the sights of Amelia Island
So it wasn’t any different on Amelia Island, where we tried to undertake one short excursion a day. As we were driving along the island’s eastern Atlantic coast, with house after condo after resort lined up along sandy beaches, my aunt, who had lived most of her life in Satellite Beach, looked upon the development and dismissed it with the verdict “tourist town.”
Of course she is right. Quaint Fernandina Beach, the island’s major village, has a tree-shaded main street bereft of hardware, convenience and other stores stocked with daily necessities, filled instead with shops selling T-shirts, jewelry, novelties and the flowing, Bohemian-style clothing beloved by middle-aged women. Saturday market is more of the same, with only a few vendors selling produce, nuts, pies, jellies,
seafood and other consumables, with the rest given over to botanicals, birdhouses, jewelry, pottery, woodworking, painted palm fronds and other crafts, though the many dogs that had brought their owners were testimony that the market is also a gathering spot for locals. Fernandina Beach also has many beautiful homes and buildings that are older than Josie, which makes driving through its neighborhoods a visual pleasure.
Our first destination was the Amelia Island Museum of History, where we were late (of course!) to join the museum’s Eight Flags Tour, focusing on the fact that this is the only US location to have been under the dominion of eight different flags (French, Spanish, British, rogue Patriot’s and Green Cross flags, Mexican Revolutionary, Confederacy and US). It was difficult getting Josie’s wheelchair through the museum’s narrow doors, unsurprising considering the old building served as the county jail until 1978. When our guide told us that a Civil-War-era canon ball had recently been discovered and taken away for detonation, he remarked that had it gone off here, we might have ended up the last casualties of the Civil War. For a fleeting second, I thought that would have been pretty cool.
Probably our most interesting outing was to Fort Clinch State Park, where we ate a picnic lunch under majestic oak trees draped in Spanish moss and then visited the historic fort, constructed in 1847. Lucky for us, it was bustling with re-enactors, who were standing guard, marching in unison, beating drums, making tack and bread in the kitchen and resting in bunk beds. It was one of the fort’s many reenactment weekends, during which the enthusiasts even get to spend the night, which is pretty awesome considering the fort is largely without electricity and is therefore pretty authentic. It all proved a bit startling and frightening for Josie, however, until I explained that they weren’t real soldiers but were just men playing dress-up, enjoying what was largely a camp for grownups.
But there were a lot more things I didn’t tackle on Amelia Island with my 100-year-old aunt, either because of our slow pace or because of the inhibitions of a wheelchair. We didn’t do the many hiking paths on Amelia Island, including those at Clinch Fort State Park that might have given us a glimpse of a gator. We didn’t go bike riding, and we didn’t take advantage of Amelia’s 13 miles of pristine quartz sand, running the entire length of the island’s Atlantic coast, all open to the public. Although Florida accounts for 90% of US nesting grounds for sea turtles, with May through October being prime times when loggerhead and green turtles come ashore onto Amelia Island to lay their eggs, we didn’t venture out at night to try to see them.
It was only on our last day on Amelia Island, after Josie had finally become comfortable with our hotel room and was taking her afternoon nap, that I finally slipped away to Main Beach Park just outside our hotel. I waded into the water to let the waves bully me back and forth. I read a bit. I walked a bit. I watched people with body boards, people sunning (me, safely ensconced under an umbrella, can’t believe they still do that), a girl doing cartwheels, a father and son digging a hole in the sand, grandparents with their toddler grandchild (although I badly wanted to, I refrained from asking what kind of equipment they had brought), people beachcombing for sharks’ teeth (yes, it’s a thing), me scanning the waters for a glimpse of said sharks, only later reading that the teeth are from sharks that lived millions of years ago.
I was gone just 40 minutes, only to find Josie awake, eating the hotel cookie I thought I had safely hidden for her dinner. Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with her memory.
That night I showed her a recent photograph of my parents. She acknowledged her baby brother with a smile and remarked that my mother looked pretty good. “She’s 85!” I said proudly.
“Big deal,” Josie said.
Big deal, indeed. When I grow up, I want to be just like Josie.
For more articles on Florida, see my blog Florida History Museum in Need of an Update, and my article on Key West in gettingontravel.com.
Post Script: Josie died in 2020. She was 103. She is missed, but never forgotten.
Enjoyed the read, Beth