He stayed in a campsite at Steinhatchee over night, which is just before Perry. It is an old fishing port on the Gulf of Mexico, which was the smuggling area for Marijuana, which locally used to be called Square Mullet due the the shape of the shape of the bales when it was shipped. There is even a long, straight street that was deliberately made is such a way that aircraft could takeoff and land in order to get the stuff in or out of the area. The 'industry' was killed off and with new regulations for fishing the port and community contracted extremely.
He met the following lovely, interesting people at the campsite:
He met the following lovely, interesting people at the campsite:
Keith Peacock used to be one of the top tattoo artists in the States and was friends with the Allman brothers. He tattooed them & gave Gerry photo of him tattooing Alan Woody, the bass player who died of heroin overdose. On it he has written ”To Gerry may god bless you on your journey”. Dwayne Allman and Barry Oakley from the group both died in separate motor bike accidents. Keith has been married & divorced 6 times, twice to same woman! He now lives happily in his caravan where he says he has a roach problem and Gerry said roaches were running around. He gets paid on 1st of month and was skint until then so Gerry bought him a beer. The love of his life now is Willie his bike 900cc Honda motorbike!
Jason Praytor is a correction officer of local correctional institution there and has 3500 inmates in his facility alone. They have a saying here which is Detroit has the car industry, Kansas has wheat and Florida has prisons. There are more there than anywhere else in states and they have many inmates who were involved in the drugs industry. He said that lifers are the easiest to deal with because they think if they behave they may get out one day.
The state of Florida has turned this into an industry .lso because the Federal Government actually takes out a bond of $100,000 per inmate and then receives interest sufficient to easily cover all costs, So there you have it. Prisons are a legitimate and extremely important revenue scource for the State of Florida. The USA puts more people in jail than anywhere else in world. He said he was very respectful of what Gerry is doing and said he would love to do something like that one day. He wanted Gerry to be guest of honour at sisters wedding at the weekend, which was a very nice invitation but Gerry wants to push on. He gave $20 dollars for the breast cancer charity.
The state of Florida has turned this into an industry .lso because the Federal Government actually takes out a bond of $100,000 per inmate and then receives interest sufficient to easily cover all costs, So there you have it. Prisons are a legitimate and extremely important revenue scource for the State of Florida. The USA puts more people in jail than anywhere else in world. He said he was very respectful of what Gerry is doing and said he would love to do something like that one day. He wanted Gerry to be guest of honour at sisters wedding at the weekend, which was a very nice invitation but Gerry wants to push on. He gave $20 dollars for the breast cancer charity.
October in USA is breast cancer month and everywhere Gerry goes he sees pink ribbon stickers everywhere. At the campsite he also met a man called Brian, who is working on the Mobil pipeline, and his daughter Morgan. She’s raising money for breast cancer and was dressed from head to toe in pink and was wearing a breast cancer wristband.
Gerry was amazed to find Bars whose walls were decorated with 300 one dollar notes with names and comments on! This area used to be so affluent that people could afford to do this.
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