Flipping off Mar-a-Lago

Ok, here are a few photos I took back in August 2018 and saved for a special occasion that turned out to be today. I was in Florida to watch the Parker Solar Probe launch and had some free time afterward before I had to fly home, so I figured I'd go wander around Miami and the Everglades for a few days since I'd never been there before. (And, um, I'm bound to finish those blog posts eventually, but that's a whole separate issue.) On the way back, I made a little side trip out to Palm Beach to indulge one of my more petty hobbies, flipping off properties that belong to a certain soon-to-be ex-President. I have only actually done this twice (because it's a silly hobby and I'm not going to invest a lot of time or gas money into it): First for his ugly Waikiki hotel, and then this set of photos for Mar-a-Lago, his infamous private club near the beach.

Taking these wasn't eventful at all; I just sort of rolled by, took my photos without stopping, and continued on my way back to Orlando. I can't say it was a highlight of the trip as a whole, but it broke up the monotony of the drive, and it was mildly fascinating to see it in person. It's hard to explain, but as tacky as the place looks here, it's somehow even more tacky in person. In particular, the famous tower on top looks like one of the decorative faux-Spanish towers at a thousand California minimalls, maybe a bit toward the upscale end. It also felt weirdly menacing; it's tough to disentangle the building and its owner, of course, but looking at it it's easy to imagine that really bad things have happened there, and other bad things have been planned there, and that this badness is ongoing, maybe escalating. Honestly the whole surrounding area felt that way, as if his personality had bled into the soil like a leaky septic tank.

One weird detail about the place is that before Trump owned it, it spent a number of years as the most useless and expensive white elephant in the US national park system, deemed unusable as a presidential retreat or as a museum open to the general public, but with exorbitant maintenance costs anyway. They were happy to be rid of it -- which almost never happens -- and almost certainly won't want it back once Trump is done with it. So while it's bound to remain a pilgrimage spot for the world's nazis and braying dipshits, at least it won't happen at taxpayer expense. And given the local geography they'll need scuba gear to visit within a few more decades. Maybe at that point any part of the tower that isn't underwater could be repurposed as a sort of monument to climate denial, I dunno.

Anyway, good riddance.