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Notes from a service station at mile marker 144 along the Florida Turnpike
Bunny and I are going out of town for the weekend. We're on the Florida
Turnpike [1], and had just turned into the Port St. Lucie Service Plaza only
to find a total mob scene.
It wasn't just crowded. It was packed with barely enough room to squeeze
inside the main service building. There were literally over a thousand kids
milling about the place, over a dozen long distance touring buses, and State
Troopers stationed liberally throughout the parking lot.
The kids were all from Broward and Palm Beach high schools, headed north for
some large powwow in central Florida and by pure coincidence, all the buses
had decided to stop at the same plaza just minutes before we arrived.
The State Troopers had nothing to do with the students—they were there due to
a “heightened security level from the Department of Homeland Security” (which
to me, is something I would have expected from the Soviet Union, not the
United States). Nothing more was said about the threat.
[1]
http://www.floridasturnpike.com/
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