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Driving through the Magnificent Pleasurable Capital of the World at Orlando, I used to be struck by the deliberation that Florida should probably add to the list a planetary designation for human perversity. There are a few things wondrously upside-down about a state to which individuals congregate, supposedly because of its climate as well as normal loveliness, but where most of that attractiveness has been drained and covered in Rooms to Go's and Scratch and Dent Worlds, and where the majority of residents feel about air-conditioning the way astronauts feel about spaceships.

Driving through the Magnificent Pleasurable Capital of the World at Orlando, I used to be struck by the deliberation that Florida should probably add to the list a planetary designation for human perversity. There are a few things wondrously upside-down about a state to which individuals congregate, supposedly because of its climate as well as normal loveliness, but where most of that attractiveness has been drained and covered in Rooms to Go's and Scratch and Dent Worlds, and where the majority of residents feel about air-conditioning the way astronauts feel about spaceships.

If you happen to be one of those people who has given up on Florida, I push you to venture around an hour and a half north of the Magic Kingdom, into Marion in addition to Alachua Counties, anywhere Orlando's ravening grid falters and the panorama stops appearing like something loaded off a van. A green edema of hills rises over the coastal flatness. Tire dealerships subside to boiled-peanut stands. Artesian springs the color of glacial ice spill from the earth. Horses that aren't on theme-park salaries stalk rolling land beside the highway.

South of Gainesville on Route 441, my buddy and I passed McIntosh and Evinston, unassuming whistle-stops where Victorian clapboard houses sit alongside trailer parks beneath such dense canopies of Spanish moss that it looks like somebody dragged a squeegee down the view while it was still wet. As dusk ripened, we stopped into Micanopy, a one-boulevard township of aged brick and log buildings, an area so steeped in old-style appeal it's challenging to face on the main drag with no faint apprehension that at any instant film studio security guards are going to roust you from the set.

Whilst Micanopy surely has one of the highest number of antique shops per capita in the state, the city is amply rust streaked and mold spangled that the place somehow accomplishes the feat of not seeming twee. "This is Florida like it was once," believed Monica Beth Fowler, the proprietor and operator of Delectable Collectables, a store specializing in atypical cameos. "It's one of the few places in the state that hasn't been ruined yet." Past Micanopy's antiques strip sits the Herlong Manor, a bed and breakfast of unassailable grace - Corinthian columns the scale of grain silos, verandas exploding among ferns. However at my friend's idea we'd made plans to stay the night 20 minutes towards east, within the village of Cross Creek.

My companion is an editor who lives in North Carolina but who proudly descends from Florida "cracker" stock. In north Florida, "cracker," a reverential sobriquet for this area's swamp-dwelling pioneers, is far from an label. Cross Creek - native soil of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the novelist and storyteller of the Depression-era cracker monde who died in 1953 - may well probably be described as the Florida Cracker Capital of the Planet. Our destination was the Yearling Restaurant ("Home of Cracker Cooking"), named after Rawlings's 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. A plain, roadside building of sun-scorched boards, the Yearling, we found, was exceptionally sincere about its rural bona fides. A smooth gator skin, a Confederate pennant along with a rack of historic outboard motors trimmed the restaurant's ramparts. A local blues musician presided inside the dining area, crooning to his dobro, as diners tucked into a menu of customary fare. We ordered the "cracker hors d'oeuvre plate," which included fried mushrooms, fried ingots of gator tail, fried green tomatoes and fried frog legs whose girth and musculature would have put a speed skater to disgrace.

The Yearling's owners also operate the close by Lodge that rented Cabins, where we'd booked lodgings for the night. The lodge consists of 7 humble cabins situated below a shelter of living oak limbs and echoes with the hearty belchings of bullfrogs around the nearby brook. "That's what's so groovy about it out here. This could by no means be Orlando. You could never eradicate all of the banana spiders, palmetto bugs as well as snakes." "So awesome," she said. "It's the country that time forgot!