Bunny and I are going out of town for the weekend. We're on the Florida Turnpike [1], and had just turned into the Port St. Lucie Service Plaza only to find a total mob scene.
It wasn't just crowded. It was packed with barely enough room to squeeze inside the main service building. There were literally over a thousand kids milling about the place, over a dozen long distance touring buses, and State Troopers stationed liberally throughout the parking lot.
The kids were all from Broward and Palm Beach high schools, headed north for some large powwow in central Florida and by pure coincidence, all the buses had decided to stop at the same plaza just minutes before we arrived.
The State Troopers had nothing to do with the students—they were there due to a “heightened security level from the Department of Homeland Security” (which to me, is something I would have expected from the Soviet Union, not the United States). Nothing more was said about the threat.