What do you do when a new friend from Spain wants to experience some real North Florida downhome culture?

Take her zydeco dancing at Bradfordville Blues Club, that’s what!

And that’s just what I did with a posse of pals a couple of weekends ago, when our friend Amanda, who grew up in Tallahassee, was visiting from Mallorca, where she lives now. She had brought her friend Lucia and wanted to introduce her to la dolce vita a la Tallahassee.

The upper Wacissa River was on my radar the other day and I saw three other boats. Three! A kayak and two canoes. That's because I ventured to the headsprings just east of Tallahassee after work during the week, taking advantage of the long days of late summer/early fall. I had almost two hours of blissful, quiet paddling, and I had the 42-foot deep Big Blue, the largest spring along the river, all to myself.

On a recent Sunday afternoon we ventured out to the Museum of Florida History located in the R.A. Gray Building in Downtown Tallahassee.  I started taking my children to this museum when they were just toddlers and as they have gotten older it is still a place that they enjoy going.  From the moment you walk in, the children's attention is captured as you wander through the different periods of history from the age of the Mastodon to the Native Indians to the Civil War and beyond. 

I was so happy to see the construction on Gaines Street finally come to an end.  The long standing construction was taxing on the businesses in the area.  So much so that St. Mike's Pub used its sign to convey a simple yet widely shared opinion, "Fix the damn road."  It was always such a hassle to navigate around the area every time I wanted to grab food at Voodoo Dog.  Now that it's over, I can check out the merchandise at some of the shops in the area like Two Moon Trees, Phaze One Skate Shop, and the new Retrofit Records.   

Wakulla Springs State Park is one of my favorite places on the planet. I have swum in the icy waters there, and I have napped on the grass with the chatter of children lulling me into a doze. I have hiked its trails, and I have taken the Jungle Cruise (my friend Linda Hall drives one of the boats) many times, never tiring of the splendid pageant of birds and alligators and silver, leaping mullet.

If you're anything like me, towards the end of the week I start running out of ideas for what to have for dinner.  I can only have pasta or stir fry so many times a week.  Luckily, every Thursday there is a place where a lot of the great mobile food trucks gather together to serve some of Tallahassee's best diverse cuisine.  I'm not talking about premade burgers under heat lamps or ziti on hotplates--I'm talking about Food Trucks.

I recently joined the owner of The Wilderness Way, Georgia Ackerman, her husband, Rick Zelznak and a couple of other friends at Lake Hall for some fun with stand up paddle boards (SUPs). SUPs are a cross between surfboards and kayaks. They look a lot like surfboards, you stand on top of them, but you paddle them with a long paddle.

I had the wonderful opportunity to accompany a WFSU film crew to St. George Island State Park on Wednesday. For their Dimensions television show, they are featuring the Forgotten Coast segment of the Florida Circumnavigational Saltwater Paddling Trail, a 1,515-mile sea kayaking trail around the entire Florida coastline that I mapped for the Florida Office of Greenways and Trails. We arrived in the morning just after a rain and the sky was perfect for filming and photography. And not too hot, either.

Opposite in nature than the spring-fed Wakulla River is the swamp-fed Sopchoppy River, about 35 miles southwest of Tallahassee. Fed by small creeks emerging from the watery jungle of the Bradwell Bay Wilderness Area and other wet areas of the Apalachicola National Forest, the Sopchoppy's color varies from yellow-gold to red-black to coffee-colored, depending on rainfall, water depth and sunlight. Think of the river's headwater swamps as giant tea pots brewing a concoction of fallen leaves, cypress needles, bark and wood and you get the picture. The water is clean from a pollution standpoint, however, since it emerges from wholly undeveloped lands. 

If you're hankering for some delicious country smoked sausage and country milled grits, take a leisurely drive up Centerville Road towards Bradley's Country Store. I would suggest putting on some Creedence Clearwater Revival during the ride to put you in the right mood. As you approach Bradley's, you'll surely come to realize how fitting the name is. This quaint little establishment sits under the cool shade of some giant oaks, protected from the pull of time.

I don't have much of a green thumb and sometimes I worry that my children are going to grow up thinking that most vegetables and fruits grow in cans. So I packed up the family and brought them down to the Downtown Market Place to expose them to fresh produce, music and art. I figured the kids and I would walk around a little bit and maybe grab a few tomatoes. Heck, I was even thinking I might try and find the inner Martha Stewart in me and perhaps get some fresh peaches to make a cobbler.

The Engine Room is the place in Tallahassee to check out the newest trends in music today.  It attracts musical acts from across the nation and from different genres ranging from punk to house music.  More recently, a lot of electronic acts are performing there which is telling of the new trend in music.  The music scene is quickly moving towards more electronic acts since emerging technologies are making full bands a thing of the past.  The people who book the shows really have their finger on the pulse of the music industry.