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Beautiful Florida, The Winter Playground of the Nation

Undated

If Maeterlinck had known Florida, the quest of the Blue-Bird would perhaps have been told in fewer words, for down in this sea-girt, flowery State lies the Way to Happiness. The home of the novelist's elusive songster is on the ever-green shores of the Florida Coast, in feathery palm-groves, where whispering winds sing softly, the blue Atlantic breaks on a golden strand and sunny skies shed their radiance over all created things.

Unlike many winter resorts, Florida is not a mental attitude due to a man-made atmosphere, wonderful and complete as are the works of human hands here, but rather a delightful, living reality fashioned in the hour of Nature's happiest mood, endowed with the rarest gifts of climate, and with a beauty of limitless extent, and where plant and animal life thrive because it is not possible to avoid doing so, people will also be happy because it is in the air, brought and kept there by the sweetness of the soft salt-laden winds and the smiling skies above them.

Florida's climate rivals the Italian Riviera and to get there is far more within the reach of the average busy American: and social gayety or quiet living is as attractive as on the shores of the Mediterranean. From Jacksonville to Key West, along the East Coast and through Central Florida to the West Coast is a continuous winter play-ground with every possible means of enjoyment provided to suit the requirements of every human taste or fancy. The finest hotels in the world are there, and filled throughout the season with smartest social life on the continent; and also, in endless numbers are charming, quiet retreats where society does not rule and there are no troublesome formal exactions. Every known form of outdoor pleasuring is pursued in Florida, without the necessity of considering any adverse climate conditions, for the winter skies are always smiling and December breezes are as balmy as May day zephyrs. You can golf at Christmas tide on the best links in the country; motor in mid-winter over the finest of roads and speed up your "90'' on the hardest beach speedways in the world. You can fish in the deep sea, or drop your line into placid inland waters; you can sail, or run your natty motor boat on ideal bays and inlets or pilot your jaunty steam yacht over the ocean waves and come to anchor in safe havens, where sea and shores are all lighted with the glinting rays of hundreds of electric lamps. There are wonderful miles of hard-surface roads that reach to the inland country, or down, all the way to the coast.

Source:
Excerpt from "Beautiful Florida" Beautiful Florida, The Winter Playground of the Nation, Undated. Published by Curt Teich & Co., Chicago, U.S.A.