February 08th, 2022

Tim and I had a fun adventure this past Sunday.  We did an Auto Audio Tour!  It was fun and interesting and honestly, we look forward to doing more of them.

If you are unfamiliar with the term - Auto Audio Tour - it is a tour that you do in the comfort of your own vehicle that is guided by a disembodied voice.  Sounds spooky?  Nah, not at all. It was awesome!  

Tim and I had done one auto audio tour before a very long time ago in Maui, Hawaii.  We decided that we wanted to drive the Hana Road which is a 64.4 mile long scenic, gorgeous, amazingly beautiful, twisty winding, narrow road that passes over 59 different bridges, 46 of which are one lane only.  Yikes!  Obviously it is slow going, which it should be to appreciate the 360 view of majesty, history and nature.  We were going to do the drive anyway, but when we heard about the audio tour, thought it would be a good idea to know more about what we were seeing.  So we stopped and picked it up.  Back then of course, it was a CD.  And the voice would talktalktalk and then say press pause here and resume at mile marker ......whatever...  I honestly think we got so much more out of the drive than we would have otherwise.

Back to this particular Auto Audio Tour, I don't remember where I stumbled across this information, but somewhere fairly recently, I came to understand that  Sarasota County  released nine different Auto Audio Tours as part of their Centennial Celebration.  We had to purchase the auto audio tour in Maui, but this one in Sarasota is free, which is my favourite price.  I excitedly passed this information along to Tim and he agreed that this was absolutely something that we should check out on a lazy weekend day when we have no other plans.  And that day was Sunday.

Sarasota is a city here in Florida about a half hour north of us.  We have spent a great deal of time there taking advantage of it's restaurants, shops and entertainment.   It's also the name of the county that we live in, so you would think that we already knew everything that there was to know about it.  Nope.  Not even close.

We randomly selected which tour to start with and Tim downloaded the App to his phone. Then we buckled up and started out.  The Voice tells you where the tour begins so that's where we went.   This first tour was called, "Fruitville to Myakka".  Fruitville is a VERY long road in Sarasota whose name came from the fact that many of the earliest settlers to the area (1870's) came to work in some capacity in the burgeoning Orange Industry.  Orange  is a fruit......makes sense, right?  

Of course now, much of Fruitville is concrete, asphalt, glass and steel. There are countless businesses, restaurants, shops and housing of all sorts.  What was once a quiet, narrow, dirt country lane is now very busy multi-lane road.  It's hard to imagine what it used to be.  At least when we started the tour it was difficult to picture.  Myakka, on the other hand, is a river, a huge state park and yes, an area of Sarasota that is still very rural. That's where you begin to be able to envision the past with greater clarity.

The tour is all GPS driven so it knows when you are in the right place.  There you are following the directions previously given and then there is a "ding" and the voice tells you a little something about what you see out the window, or directs you to stop for a few minutes while you hear a more detailed history. Sometimes it suggests getting out for a bit and walking around to more fully appreciate what is before you.

It was so cool.  In this way we learned about the large Mennonite community in that area  that was established along the banks of Phillippi Creek in 1920 and remains active today.  We walked on hiking trails that we did not know existed and learned about the original Fruitville School.  The school opened in 1887 in a converted corncrib and had Miss Josie Clower as it's first teacher.  

We walked around the Friendship Baptist Church cemetery grounds and read aloud the names and dates on the headstones discovering, among other things,  a gentleman who was born in 1812, far too many babies, some really great names and a few Civil War Soldiers there.   Friendship Baptist is still there but it's original structure was a log cabin back in 1887.

At Celery Fields, which is now a preserve and a great place to hike, we learned that the people who came to work the original celery fields, which was one of the primary agricultural centers, earned one dollar a day and that it cost three dollars a day to feed a family of seven at that time.   Along with the strong agricultural base of course were the cattle ranches.  The Cracker Cowboys, so named because of the sound of the crack of their whips as they drove cattle, were another huge part of the creation of Sarasota county.

We heard about a museum that was new to us that we are excited to visit another time and found an entirely different entrance to Myakka State Park with zero cost to get in and a 4 mile hiking loop,  that was also a surprise.   We learned about country general stores, one of which, the Crowley General Store,  still existed into the 1960's (!) and other beautiful old churches.  Back in the day, Churches weren't just places of worship but also social centers for the entire community.

While things have changed a LOT since then, I was more impressed, I think, by the things that have not changed.  Some of the old buildings are still around, there are still working cattle ranches (as evidenced by the enormous herds of cows that we drove past), the active Mennonite community and beautiful preserves and parks.

I'm so glad that we have started doing this and I look forward to doing the remaining 8 tours.  If there is such a thing in your area, I recommend them highly!  Free Entertainment AND Education!  It's hard to beat.

​Here's a few photos of some of the things that we saw along the way: