Hidden Travel Gems with Robert Mills - Croatia Se. 2 Ep 19

Robert Mills is a distinguished world traveler and with his wife Miriam, they have ventured to over 60 countries....today's hidden travel gem focuses on Croatia.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 1:04

And we're excited today, once again, to be joining on a beautiful Tuesday. We had our one day of summer and spring yesterday here in Illinois at 71. We're back now in the low 40s, and but I saw my first Robin today, which gets me very excited and almost as excited as I get when I have Robert Mills join me for this incredible trip around the world. I have no idea where he's taking us today. He sent me some pictures, they're pretty, they're already loaded and ready to go, but I find out as much as everybody does at the same time. Robert, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 1:37

I'm delightful, Randy, and I'm thrilled to be with you once again.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

You are delightful. That is no question about it. You are uh as delighted as I am to have you on. So I'm putting my feet up. I am uh got my fresh cup of coffee here, and um it is uh today. This was uh over we did a thing over in Geneva, Illinois a number of years ago, and uh it was uh cup that I really, really enjoy, some of the best coffee that comes from the distillerychannel.com. And if everybody wants to go and start thinking about uh buying the world's most, well, not the world's most expensive coffee, but we're not gonna be cheap, we'll put it that way. Uh, it's just gonna be great coffee. Anyway, Robert, enough of our commercial for today. Uh take us around the world. Where are we going today?

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Well, first we're gonna we're gonna have a real brief uh in and out of yeah, when I went this weekend, I I looked in the paper on on Thursday last week, and I saw that there was a super bloom going on down in the barren desert in Death Valley. And my wife is a wildflower fanatic, and she's she says, Let's go. So we bicked booked tickets down there. And Friday afternoon after my history tour in San Francisco, we jumped on a plane, went to Vegas, stayed on a strip. Saturday morning we got up and drove to Death Valley and took a bunch of pictures, and it was just spectacular. And I posted on Facebook, you can see it. Um, flowers everywhere, just blooming, exploding in this barren desert. And it was it was getting close to 90 down there. You know, it's it's uh after a big rain, which happens every 10 or 20 years, this huge rain that followed by warm weather, it explodes, everything is covered in flowers. So I I went there and did that. So about um, so um let's talk about the hidden gems here, what which is what this podcast is about and why you, the listeners, should be interested in this. Okay, if you know somebody um that has gone to a big, uh, huge uh museum, you know, one that has thousands and thousands of exhibits, and you spend three days there, okay, and you're gonna go there, um, it would be very beneficial for you to ask them, you know, what did you see in that museum you could recommend to me that I should go in and not miss? Okay. Um, the same thing. Um uh if you have a person that really loves to do movies, they go to movies all the time, they've seen all the local first-run movies now. And you, if you're gonna watch a movie tonight, you might want to call them up and say, you know, there's a whole bunch of movies out there, you've seen all of them. Which one would you recommend I see tonight? Okay, or which two, you know, and so this is the role of the hidden gems that we're about to share with you here, okay. Um, and uh, you know, when I was in the mountains climbing, you know, somebody would be coming down and I would say, you know, what do I need to look out for up there? I get all kinds of intelligence. There's a slide up here around that rock up there, bare the left run. So you can learn a lot from people that have been there, okay. I've been there, and so I'm gonna save you a lot of time and I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna talk about these things which we're calling here um the hidden gems, okay. Now, there are a lot of travel brochures out there that advertisements um of all sorts, you know, and and they tell you all about where to go and stuff like that. And they have they have a couple things in common. Number one is these are the popular places, okay. Number two is those brochures are funded by many of the hotels and restaurants and these locales and the chambers of commerce. So it's not an objective thing, it's an advertisement to try to get you to go there, okay? And there's a kind of symbiotic relationship between popular places. They're popular because they're popular, and because they're popular, people hear about them and they go, they go because they're popular, not because they're any particularly better than some other place, or it certainly not because it's the best place to go, okay. So what this podcast is gonna offer you is what we call here, and it's Randy's brilliant idea, the hidden gems, okay. And these are um the these pop off the beaten path of the popular places, you know, you know, other lesser-known places, okay, that I'm gonna share with you in this in this series uh called hidden gems, okay? But they're the most fascinating, worthwhile places off the beaten path, you know, which we're gonna call here the hidden gems, okay. Now, most Americans, if you're like me, uh when you when you go think about going to Europe, you you think about going um to Germany or our France or you know uh the the you know England, maybe Scandinavian or Spain, but very few Americans um go any place other than those places, okay. 16 million Americans go to Europe every year now. Can you imagine that? You know, and uh of that five or six percent go to ever-popular Italy, all right. Um, and they mostly go on the east, the western side of Italy, you know, to Rome and Venice and uh Naples and these not Venice but to Florence. They're only you know, uh Tuscany on the on the on the western side of the nobody knows the east side. Now, if you look at the boot of Italy, you know, you guys are familiar with it, it comes down kind of in a southeasterly direction, you know. If you went off the southeastern tip and you went east, you would come to this land that is on the other side of the Adriatic Sea. That's the you know, the to the west of Italy is the Mediterranean, but on the other side is the Adriatic Sea, okay? It's only 100 miles wide. Americans never go on the other side. Less than one percent of the Americans that go abroad, go you go to Europe, go go to beyond the the uh the Adriatic, less than one percent. So already we're off the beaten path a lot. So and um as you look at this map as you go up, if if you went south, southeast from it, just continue down the the boot, you come to Greece, one of wonderful place, a lot of great spots there. And if you went north following the Adriatic Sea, you'd next come to Albania. Okay, it's a tiny little country, it's only 11,1100, 11,100 miles square miles, which is about twice as big as Death Valley National Park, and there's 2.9 million people there, and they have a GDP per capita of$5,286. So this is a poverty-stricken little country. Um, and compared to Italy, Italy's got a GDP of$31,000 per person versus US of 90. Okay, that gives you an idea of the economics here. Okay, now if you continued up the Adriatic coast, you would come to this magical, magical nation of Croatia that most Americans never go to off the beaten path, you know. And if you look at it, you'll notice something strange. You know, that the Croatia's got this gigantic coastline up and down the Adriatic. And just east of it is this quite large country called Bosnia-Herzegovina. They're landlocked, they didn't get any of this coast, you know. The coastline of Croatia is 500 miles long. So, what what happened? Okay, well, uh as many of these strange boundary things, you know, you know, World War I, the victorious powers sit around a table and divide up the world, and they they they created this nation, this artificial nation called Yugoslavia. And I call it artificial because it was made up of these component sort of countries and ethnics, they all hated each other, and they were held together by this ferocious uh leader called Marshall Tito, and he came to power in 1943, held it together. Uh, but when he died in 1980, uh, you know, it struggled on for about 10 more years in the Soviet Union, which had held it because it was communist, um, it fell apart, and then all these parts just scattered, they all flew apart. And Yugoslavia shattered into its parts, okay. Um, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, for some reason, didn't get any of the coast, it all went to Croatia, okay. Now, a 200-mile stretch of this 500-mile uh coastline on is called the Dalmatian coast, okay. And you may it was once part of the earlier kingdom of Dalmatia, okay, uh, that was part of the Austrian Empire, uh, and it existed uh is as the Dalmatian is from 1815 to 1867, okay. Now we all know about Dalmatian dogs, okay, and that's what that's where they came from, you know, that's where the name came from, and they were bred there, and you know, they had this this this this uh association in America with with fire departments, they always had their Dalmatian dog, you know. But but actually in Europe and in a lot of the world, Dalmatians were bred to be carriage dogs. And what is a carriage dog? In the old days, when people had carriages with horses, they had carriage dogs that would run alongside the horses to keep other dogs and other horses and other things from interfering with the horses to protect them so they wouldn't jump up and rear up and do all these things. And they they kind of protected people in carriages, okay. Um, so they they but today Dalmatians are all over the world, they're incredibly popular, and this is where they came from, okay. So there are many fascinating cities along this Dalmatian coast, which is utterly gorgeous, okay. But there are two of them, two cities along this that are unbelievably spectacular, and you must see them. And one of them is called Split, yeah, Split, S P-L-I-D. And the other one is called um Dubrovnik. Okay, now split is interesting, it's named for this plant there. Um, that's that's a broom, you know, what a like a scotch broom. It's one of these weeds that we call them weeds in California. And it has a stick, you know, sharp things, and the locals call it split. So that's where they it grew there, so it became known as split. Okay. Split is people were occupied at two centuries BC. It's been there forever, okay. And so these are going to be your gym city, and you're gonna just love it, okay. Um these two cities are basically the same latitude as Rome. If you went to Rome, Italy, and you just went right across, you'd be there. And it's only 100 miles across the Adriatic, it's not far, okay. Um, so uh there's a picture I'm gonna you could put up now that shows me and my wife uh sitting on this wall. Or we're gonna start out with with with Dubrovnik, and we'll do that one first, okay. Now, Dubrovnik is known as the Pearl of the Adriatic, and there's a good reason they call it that, because that's what it is. Okay, and you can see this me sitting on this wall, this medieval wall, put up in like the 13th century, and I'm looking over this gorgeous, gorgeous umble um, looks like it looks like it's fake. You know, there's only 45,000 people that live in Dubrovnik, and it was it was um uh it goes back to the third century BC, there were people living there. Um and uh what is remarkable about it, there's a lot of remarkable things about Dubrovnik, but one of them is that in a realm of the world where empires and great you know warring nations you know were always taking everything and going back and forth and everything, Dubrovnik somehow managed to keep its independence and become a free, this tiny little free self-governing city-state from the 13th century from the 1200s.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Oh, let me ask you a question just out of curiosity. This is truly a hidden gem that's hidden. How did you or your wife pick to go there? What was the you know, just 30 seconds? How did you end up?

SPEAKER_00 14:08

My wife, you know, combs over stuff and goes around, and also my brother lives in Italy. Uh, and and he actually's in Switzerland now, but his wife is Italian, so he's down there on the east coast of um of Italy, and he's got a place there. He looks right over, and they've been over there a lot. And so my brother says, You gotta see this place, you know, and so there's there's my hidden gym guide telling screen. So that's yeah, that's how that's how we picked it. Um, so so somehow this um uh this place manages to be an a free independent nation state, this tiny little thing for 500 years, okay. And what one way it did this was it's brilliant diplomats. They produced these brilliant diplomats that negotiated and and they did, and it's also, as you can imagine, it's an extremely advanced civilization there. They were one of the first places on earth that used uh running waters of close to cisterns for their public water, made it much more sanitary. Uh, they have all kinds of advanced health and and governance and and education and science. A scientist from Dubrovnik discovered uh the dynamic theory of atoms, you know. The city is full of universities that stretch back to the Middle Ages. There's spectacular cathedrals and palaces and museums that will knock your socks off. Okay, the city was really damaged in this earthquake in 1667, and its greatest claim to fame, Dubrovnik, from Americans' point of view, is that it was the very first nation on earth to recognize us as a country. Dubrovnik had this affinity for the United States, and so as soon as we got our independence from England, we don't in 1893 they said the Treaty of Paris and between England and the United States made us an independent nation. The first nation to step up and say, we recognize you as an independent nation was Dubrovnik. And so they we exchanged diplomats. The first country that we had diplomats when they came here and we went there was Dubrovnik. Okay. Um, it has an utterly wonderful climate, not cold in the winter because of the all the oceans around it. Not it's a little warm in the summer, but this the falls are spectacular. There's incredible music festivals all summer there. Um, the best time, in my view, to go there is is spring and fall, you know, May, Mar, uh, you know, March, May, and September, October. The weather is just perfect. You can just walk out of it with the t-shirt and you're fine. Um, if you go in the winter time, uh, January and December through February, everything is discount. Okay, there's people don't go tourism then. And so it's it's it's that you can get really, really cheap accommodations. If you're on a budget, go in the winter. Uh, it's still wonderful there. It doesn't get cold. Dubrovnik is an extremely safe city to visit. The crime rate is just non-existent, like you know, some of the places, all of us we talked about. Um, and if you leave your wallet or your purse on a park bench or you know, someplace in public, you come back a week later and nobody's touched it. You know, it's not something you can say about a lot of places. You know, there's a there's a joke in Chicago that you know, if you forget to take out your garbage, you know, you can wrap it in, you know, a present and put it in your car with a ribbon on it and leave the door unlocked and be gone in no time, you know. Um Dubrovnik uses the euro, so it's easy to do the money thing. Um, and Americans, because of our history with Dubrovnik, which goes all the way back to the beginning, they particularly welcome Americans there. And not everybody in the world does these days, so that's another reason. Now, what do you do there? You they have this wall around the medieval city. You can walk around the wall, and you see my wife and I doing that. Um, soak up this rich culture and these stunning pair of uh panoramic views, incredibly preserved fortifications, and go through this no, you know, only pedestrians, only old town, which is you know back to the 12th century, um, and wander in and out of these cathedrals and palaces and the the rector's palace, very popular places where the original leader of Dubrovnik held court from the 14th to the century to 1808. Okay, and it's a gigantic cultural museum there on Nagri Saksal, and there's a spectacular cave on a beach nearby called the Blue Cave. And I actually swam into the Blue Cave, and it reflects light in this strange way from these cracks that come around, and it turns the water in this deep blue color and the ceilings and it reflects it. And it just is a spectacular place to swim in there, you know. Uh lots of delightful beaches. There's some incredible nearby islands um in the Adria called the Elophidi Islands. There's an archipelago of little islands that you can go and get a ship, you know, driver a boat and go out and see them. There, there's a sponza splnz palace downtown that it's it's been converted into a cultural museum with art exhibits, and they have conferences there. And it is just an incredible place. And you'll just be you'll, you know, it's not every place you can go that has all these features to it um that that you know I think are are you know not all that common. You know, it's safe, um, it's close, you shouldn't get there easy. There's actually non-stop flights from New York that go to Dropney and split too, non-stop from New York. Um, you can also go to hop to to the Europe, the usual places, um, uh and and and get a hop over to it. Um it's off the beaten path. Um, it's gorgeous. Uh it it it is, it's they like Americans, um, and they have great food. Um, and you know, uh it's it's a wonderful it's a wonderful place to go. Um so uh this is a hidden gem, and it's all the hidden gem qualities. All right let me tell you about the other town on the on the Dalmatian coast. It's called Split, okay, after the plant. Um and it's the second largest city in Crobus. There's 160,000 people there. Uh, it's the urban center of Dalmatia. Um, and it's um uh it was founded by the Greeks. These places people have been these places forever. I mean, it's unlike here, you know. Uh the Greeks founded this place in the second century BC. Um, and then in in 280 AD, you know, 400 and some years later, this Roman emperor Dionyc Dionycle, D-I-O-C-L-E-T-I-N came there, okay, and he was so taken by the beauty of split. He said, This space is incredible. I want to put my a summer place for me here. You know, like the New Yorkers go up and they they build these summer castles in San Francisco, they go up to Tahoe. Well, he decides this is going to be his his his thing. And he so he he finds so he builds this enormous palace. I mean, this ain't no summer house, this is gigantic palace. He started working on it in 293 AD. They completed it in 305 A.D. So it took me 12 years to build this thing, it's huge, and it is stunning. You know, it's this Roman Emperor comes there with his, you know, to hang out. So they lost control of it for a while, but eventually came back under the Emperor Justesian Justinian I, um, and along with all of Dalmatia. And the history of Split is utterly fascinating. I I I it would take me three different, three full shows to go. I mean, there were nine different um Nations, kingdoms, city-states, uh, you know, that controlled it and conquered it from 980 AD to 1440 alone. Not enough of them. You'd have to go through all the it went back and forth and back and forth, back and forth, you know. Um and but like um uh uh Dubnik, the climate there is just is always the same. This is gorgeous and wonderful. A bit warm in midsummer, but you know, it's in 90s, you know, it's not it's not that hot. Um, but otherwise it's perfect. And they have this dramatic street in Split called Riva, and it was created all the way back in 1808. It's a it's a pedestrian street there, you know, and it goes to this gorgeous public square. Uh and they have an old town there as well, like the Brodick that's goes back to the Middle Ages. Then they have this beautiful Romanesque tower there with a clock tower, uh, and then and they have a cathedral, which is utterly magnificent. So the cathedrals in these places will just knock your socks off. I mean, they spared no expense, and they poured it full of art and all this, you know, and the lights and the you know, the the uh stained glass windows, it is they're all take your breath away, you know, uh religious or not. Um, and uh there's a this beautiful, uh famous bell tower on the split cathedral. It was built in the 12th century, it was 11th something, you know. They built it, and it's there, it's still there, and it looks almost new, you know. Um, so the city is full of museums. Uh, there's great archaeological stuff right there. Um, there's huge art galleries, um, and it's a center of music and poetry. There's all kinds of concerts everywhere. Um, lots of world-famous music composers are from Split, uh, and they have these incredible festivals in the summer. And if you ask the residents of Split, you know, about sports, okay, they will go crazy. The Split people call themselves the sportiest city in the world. There's a reason for that they are. Um, it is this capital of soccer, tennis, basketball, swimming, rowing, sailing, water polo, rugby, and ha and handball. I mean, all those things that are huge teams that compete. It's a very, very sports-oriented town. Um, and with a with a one of the most vibrant nightlives I've seen in any city. I mean, you go out at night, it's just it's like New York. The city never sleeps, they're just people everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

Robert, I want you to know I'm not distracted. I've got another computer going. I'm trying to keep up with you, just taking a quick look at the places that you're at. It's very fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

So I have some more to send you, right? I'll send you some more. I've got a bunch of split jobs. Let me go in and fish them up some more when you post it.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Yeah, I and again, I want everybody to know what we try to do when we get done with these shows. I actually produce them afterwards, and and I find it fascinating, and and we have a way of doing it, it's very systematic, and and it uh it's really it's really a lot of fun. I I've decided now just to let people know, I'm I'm not bored, I'm doing research as we go along here. So uh I apologize if anybody thought that that's what was happening.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

So no, I I I I I I can see you're working on on getting ready to edit this thing, and you know, and I have some um tons of pictures. And you know, people can go online, of course, today, and you can see a gazillion pictures and articles and history and everything about about both those places, and and you can get up an itinerary and you can you can get the and again everybody Robert is an amazing photographer.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

We um we get pictures from him, you know, definitely many through the week, uh, where he and his wife go and they're they're beautiful. I just try to keep up. We have a magazine coming out, by the way, where we're featuring it's called Golfers Golf and Travel. It's going to be coming out the week after the Masters or mid-April, uh, because it's it's centered on travel and golf and eating and dining. But in there, you're gonna there's a big article about Robert and his mountain climbing and some incredible pictures in there of Robert and uh some different things. So when uh you get tracking on his um uh articles in our future magazines, we're gonna, you know, he's gonna he's gonna probably just have the whole magazine himself, which is what I'm thinking from these hidden gems. So it's uh it's it's quite fun. So do tell. We've got unfortunately, we've got about 12 minutes left, and these it just goes so fast. We try to keep it within uh what people want to listen to on different we're on 38 different platforms, some of which keep us to 42 minutes, and that's why we're really accurate. So no commercials other than about our coffee, distillery channel coffee, some of the best in the world. Go to the distillerychannel.com. That's it, a 10-second commercial.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

So uh go ahead, Robert. Well, I I'm I'm you know, pretty close to the end on split here. The the um uh if if you like nightlife, okay, if you're a Manhattan lover, you know, I mean, with a seed, then sleep. But this is another Manhattan. I mean, you go out at night and at midnight, and it's just people is everywhere. I mean, it's just they're just going to these nightclubs and bars and dancing, and you can hear music, live music everywhere on the street, um, especially in the summer, but all all year. And so it's a city that is just alive and dynamic and sports-oriented and art and culture and music, you know, the great composers, and and so you just have this incredible uh you know outpouring of culture that that's just accessible to you, safe and right there. And um, and in the summer, you know, as I was mentioning, you could get a direct flight from New York right to the property and and to split, another one to split. Otherwise, you if you want to, you just go to any European hub like Paris, Rome, Frankfurt, and so forth. And then you can hop over on any number of places that will take you there. Um and you are uh, you know, to summarize it, it it's safe, uh, it's close, it's inexpensive, it's off the beaten path, it's gorgeous. Um, and uh they like Americans. Um, and you know, there's not every place that you can go to nowadays that you can say that, you know, you can have a nice safe on vacation and come back without breaking the wallet, and you can see culture that the likes of which I mean it's it's I've not seen in many places. So when I when we were there, we just said, My God, this is a fine. You came back and congratulated my brother for recommending the place. You know, it it's it's just spectacular. It I found it better than any place in in Italy. And it's all tiny. I mean, these cities are tiny, and it's all compressed into this one layer. You can wander around uh in an evening and see just you know, and enormous if you like, if you like architecture and you like our archaeology and you like history and you like good food, and you know, uh and you like sounds terrible, terrible terrible, it's just terrible. It's a terrible, terrible thing that you know have to endure all that. But uh if if you're looking for a place that just specializes in all this, you know, a hidden gem, less than one percent of Americans that go into Europe uh on these planes ever go there. And uh, I think it's less but one percent actually go across into any of the countries on on the on the the eastern side of of the um uh Adriatic Sea. And uh, you know, so here's your hidden gem, folks. You know, if you're if you're thinking about going over there, um here's something you can get on the get on the your flight and get get get it booked up and and go and have have some fun there. Also, bring your bathing suit. You can go out and get on a boat and go out of these islands, you can see this these the beaches, um, the the blue cave, you can swim into the blue cave, um, and you're just gonna have a time of your life there, you know, and um uh in in the in the spring, summer, or fall. And if you want to go in the winter, it's not that cold there. I mean, it's not it's it's it's like San Francisco in the winter, it's not doesn't get snowy or anything. And and you go there in the winter, it's really cheap to be there. Um, so so that's that's the that's the two hidden gems today.

SPEAKER_01 30:28

Um you know, hidden gems are are you know, I know you've experienced them. We're getting ready to leave in two or three days to uh we decide it's in it's it's springtime. We're gonna go, we got a lot of friends to go see, but uh we're gonna end up going down, ending up down with our partners down in uh Tampa St. Pete. Got some work you got to get done. Uh we we have media credentials, of course, we're gonna be covering week after next. Uh it's gonna be the Valspar uh PGA tournament, uh where old Uncle Randy gets to go in there and get the stories from uh the PGA pros up close and personal. But that's a very interesting golf course in Florida, where it doesn't look like it's in Florida. It has trees and forests and hills, and you know, most typically to build a golf course in Florida, you dig out a hole, it fills with water automatically. You take that dirt and you put it up in the fairway and on the green, and you're just moving dirt, you're just creating uh you know water spots. But uh, we're going to Tampa St. Pete. One of the reasons we are, our partner Bob Albrich, who's a friend of ours, uh Robert and mine, going all the way back to high school, uh, he and uh his wife lived there, and uh his uh their home in Tampa got hit by the three hurricanes in the last uh you know, last three that came through Florida, not last year, but the years before. And uh Judy's house never had been hit by any really after effects, you know, from the hurricane, but the flooding, uh, the ocean you know rising, um not only wiped out her house once, not twice, but three times. Um and uh so now they're doing some very innovative things in Florida to uh help mitigate some of those things. So we're gonna go down and and take a look.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

Now to the listeners out there, if you if you have the the time and the resources, um uh and you love flowers and you want to see something don't blow your mind, uh, hop a flight to Vegas. You know, there's get to Vegas anytime. I I used to coordinate these big things of lawyers, and lawyers always wanted to go to Vegas because you can get there cheap and fast anytime, anywhere in the country. You can stay cheap and eat cheap and get all this. Well, you can go to Vegas and then rent a car. You know, I rent a car from the Enterprise and just drive right over less 90 the two hours you're there in the middle of Death Valley with all these flowers, as far as you can see the mountains alive, these flowers. It happens only once every 10 or 20 years, you know. So if you can get a chance to make it just amazing to me how the seed pods stay, you know, stay in the very dry, you know, ground that never gets any rain. All of a sudden it gets us rain, the sun shines, boom, all these different colored flowers explode out of it, you know. And um uh, but you know, I uh when I was back in my class action days, um uh there was an oil spill in this Tampa St. Pete. And so I hopped a plane went down there and got a client and filed a class action lawsuit. And so I went did a lot of time in in Tampa St.

SPEAKER_01 33:41

Pete and uh was that was that the the big rig in the Gulf that uh caused the case.

SPEAKER_00 33:47

No, this was uh two two uh tankers were were were drunk and raised the pilots were drunk and they were racing each other in these oil tanks. And uh and and one of them hit, you know, uh and and uh it's and black oil comes up on this snow white beaches there at St. Pete, you know, and it's it was uh it needed to get so I I took care of that.

SPEAKER_01 34:08

And um it's it's it's like the feeling out of that uh that movie um Casablanca, whoever would have thought, you know, there was gambling in the back room. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

Whoever thought there'd be gambling in the casino, you know.

SPEAKER_01 34:22

Um my goodness. We were down there actually, we got about a minute. We were down there uh after the golf oil spill, we were we were doing and working in the world of golf, actually building golf greens uh in uh in Fort Myers. And they had crews that they were cleaning up during the day, staying at the same hotel motel we were at. Boy, you talk about a rough, a rough core of individuals that uh are going out and cleaning up oil every day. Um that that hotel experience was uh they literally would come into the hotel and you would smell like you're on an oil rig. They could never get, they couldn't get they couldn't get rid of it. I mean, it was God love them for cleaning up our beaches, but oh my goodness, what a what a uh what an amazing experience that uh there are places for everybody uh in the world. But Robert, this is great. Uh I think you're going to enjoy uh podcasts in the future, everybody. Obviously, you can go and find these podcasts on our Roku channels, our Roku channels, by the way. Uh we're transitioning not only on Roku, but Roku feeds that are going to be on our Live EcoStyle uh website, our all the goodthingsinlife.com website, same website, but it's gonna have our Roku, and now we're expanding into Amazon Fire and an Android app. And that's and all three of those, all those feeds, all these different channels, all of Robert's features. He has his own channel within our channel uh as it continues to grow. And you can go there, you go on Roku, you go to Amazon Fire within the next 30 days. Uh, but then you can go to all of our Facebook pages. Um, we've got 17 of those, and we've got 18 podcast platforms, uh, iHeart, Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music. If you can't find Robert, uh, you need a good exterminator because you're not looking at any of the bugs in your house either. You know, he either everywhere. He's like a he's like a mess of ants. You can't get rid of him. But Robert, thank you very much for a wonderful, charming place I never heard of, and and I'm sure nobody else did. What a great tour it was. Please, people, go to your, as you listen to Robert, if you have a chance, go to your uh just Google uh places where Robert takes us. It's a fun, fun environment uh to sit here and listen and to watch and and get online and uh you know, or go to our or just watch this. I try to post-produce them and continue to add in more information. So anyway, Robert, thank you again, and uh thank you to your wife for looking and doing all the research because you know without her um possibly it might be a little bit more difficult for you to do these things through life, you know. So awesome. So thank you to Miriam and uh thank you again and be safe and healthy, and like my grandsport who said, for everybody in the world, always leave a better footage because you just never know who to watch. Anyway, doing it again, probably back Thursday. We'll be back on Robert Mills to talk to you soon.