On the Florida 'fear' thing: before going there I'd set up a deal with, I think, AMF to do some pictures from/with a Crestliner Rampage motorboat. In the hotel, I asked the desk clerk for instructions as to how to drive to the office. He took a look at the address and told me I couldn't go there. I asked why, and he said because you're white. I thought he was kidding, and we set off to find the place as best we could, armed with the address and an Avis street map. It appeared to be simple to work our way along the grid system and get to where we wanted to get. Not so. The corners were not all signed with names, and we never did find our destination. We stopped., at one point, to look at the map again and perhaps ask local directions. As we sat there, I noticed that we were indeed the only white people in sight, and that the cars were all rather old, large ones with smoked windows, exactly as per all the gangster movies you ever saw. We decided we didn't want to have walk-on parts, and just turned round and got the hell out.
We ended up hiring a staid old fishing/tourist cruiser and going along rhe Intracoastal waterway for a morning, not at all the experience or photo-op that a Rampage would have offered.
Struck me as odd that the company would have given us a dangerous address for our co-operative venture... The other thing that made me a bit nervous was going down to Key West: hoped I wouldn't go the wrong way out of Miami and end up in Freedom City. You may laugh, but my sense of direction is not perfect! It took me years to find my way around the local town of Pollensa: take me up a side-street and I'd have been totally lost. (In my defence, though, it was designed to defeat raids from Barbary Coast pirates.) I do think, though, that we are connected, more or less, to the pigeon family of birds: my wife had a wonderful sense of direction and seldom felt lost in any strange place we ended up working; I was the absolute opposite. Descended from the wrong breed of pigeon, I suppose.
Rob