There is at least a smile’s worth of amusement in the fact that I scheduled my trip to the UK so that I could be back with a couple of days to catch my breath before the South Dade Chamber of Commerce Centennial Celebration that we held last night. It was a cocktail reception at the Homestead Community Center and went quite well. A lot of people put in a lot of work and one of the things were three different slide shows put together from a huge stack (I was told 900) of old and new photos. The guys in charge had set up three monitors in different places around the room and so a different slide show appeared on each one. There were some great shots and I know it brought back memories for many of the attendees.

The “amusing” part being the idea that deep South Dade really didn’t get settled by pioneering farmer families until more or less the 1870s and then it was the railroad folks coming in that really opened things up. Even compared to the rest of the East Coast, that was more than 200 years after the Plymouth Rock folks were getting established. The villages that I was making my way through on my trip could mark their existence to centuries before that. The comparison brought to mind when we were living in Italy and took a tour to one of the nearby Chianti wineries. The father of however many generations it had been made the comment as we stepped into the main tasting room that this was the “new” part of the house – it only dated to the 1500s. They had some thresholds and stonework that had been built during Roman times. The father, by the way, was more proud of their olive oil than their wine; his son handled the wine part.

100 years is something to celebrate though and everyone seemed to have a good time last night.