Silence in Venus
We’ve been silent for a few days, busy with the real world. With various levels of sickness amongst all of us, we’ve been preparing for our next year on the road and dreaming about what could be in store for us thereafter. During our pit stop at Redux we had a visit with our old friend Alex from Orlando. He told us about this property for sale in Venus, Florida. Our interest was lackluster until we saw the images online, and quickly the dream factory was racing with what could be done with this place. After a roof repair job, we decided to take a field trip to Venus.
It turned into a team building retreat, with discussions, dinners, and fights which resulted in redefining our group relationship. It was something that was desperately needed after our year on the road together, and has set us in a clear direction (not necessarily geographically speaking, however). The irony of all of this was less than two weeks earlier Jamie wrote an article for an upcoming Charleston Magazine issue that actually developed a dictionary entry for “trantenna,” which is a term used to describe a person traveling in our group ( coined by a guy we met in Mexico ) and should not be confused with the term transsexual.
The Venus property has had many people come and look at it, I think because of the relative fame of the owners, Jacque and Roxanne, who have spent thirty plus years developing the property and just as many years developing a view of the future with the Venus Project. Several documentaries have focused on Jacque’s view that the world should switch to a resource (rather than monetary) based economy. Check out the links for more.
The thing that you get while taking a tour of the property that you don’t see when you check out the images or their website or the documentaries, is that Jacque and Roxanne are model builders. Their future is interesting LOOKING. But sitting in the smoldering heat of their life-sized models revealed that the buildings are nothing more than eye candy. Function in Venus is subservient to form with little attention to ventilation, energy and water conservation, and comfort. They could have easily taken a cue from the earthship project and done something truly amazing here. But instead, we walked the property with visions of it’s potential and despite the $550,000 price tag being relatively cheap, it seemed more expensive when we left. Venus certainly got us thinking about where and how we will park after the road, but we’re unsure if we should go to the trouble of landing on another planet - especially one so close to the sun.
