Devil’s Millhopper Geological State Park. A Walk Across the Bridge of Lions. The Palace Saloon. The Kissing Tree.
These are just a few of the places mentioned in Ronnie Lovler and Dixie Neilson’s “Cultural Sites of North Florida: A Backroads Guide to Small Museums and Other Local Treasures” released this week.
The new manual, published by the University Press of Florida, aims to inspire and guide residents and travelers to explore hidden gems of North Florida’s small-town Americana with a roundup of 43 sites and their stories, from museums and culturally significant places, to nature centers and parks all the way from Crystal River to Jacksonville.
“Cultural Sites” is small enough to fit in any car glove compartment and organizes the local treasures geographically so travelers can maximize their trips by visiting as many places as possible.
Gainesville-based authors Lovler, a journalist, and Neilson, a former museum director, will kick off their book tour with an official launch at 2 p.m. on Oct. 26 at The Theater of Memory (1705 NW 6th St.), one of the places included in “Cultural Sites.” The duo will also speak about their book at 7 p.m. on Nov. 5 at Temple Shir Shalom (3855 NW 8th Ave.).
They said they hope the book serves as a bridge connecting people with the sites and places that put them in touch with cultures past and present shaping their own backyards.
“I love to travel, but it doesn’t have to be a plane trip to California or to Europe or Asia,” Lovler said. “It can be a day trip. You can walk to places and just get to know your own backyard, where you live, and learn to appreciate that as well.”
The backyard curiosity that led to “Cultural Sites” came naturally for Lovler as a seasoned reporter. After studying journalism at Ohio State University, Lovler spent the 70s, 80s and 90s covering Puerto Rico, Central America, South America and every country in Latin America for CNN, eventually rising to the ranks of bureau chief in Nicaragua and Chile.
Since moving to Gainesville, Lovler became an adjunct professor at the University of Florida and Santa Fe College, while also working as a correspondent for Mainstreet Daily News, a free, local newspaper covering Alachua County and surrounding areas in North Central Florida.
In 2021, Lovler and J.C. Derrick, publisher of Mainstreet Daily News, decided to launch a travel column written by Lovler titled “Florida Finds.” Over the last four years, the column has highlighted a range of small, area museums, parks and interesting places readers could learn about and visit.
Along with winning the “Senior Vision Media Award” from The Florida Council on Aging in 2024 for her “Aging Matters” series with Mainstreet, Lovler’s Florida Finds story on the Florida Agricultural Museum in Palm Coast won bronze for Outdoor & Recreation stories at the Florida Press Association’s 2025 Weekly Newspaper Contest.
Lovler said she instantly started dreaming about turning the columns into a book, especially after Derrick gave her the greenlight.
“If you’re driving down a highway and you see something, instead of just driving by, maybe you’ll stop and take a look at something,” she said.
Lovler first met Neilson while volunteering at the Matheson History Museum where Neilson worked as the director. Neilson also previously worked at the Harn Museum of Art.
One day when the two women were at dinner after Neilson retired, Lovler shared her idea for a book based on “Florida Finds” that would feature museums and asked Neilson if she wanted to join her.
“I think it took me probably 30 seconds to say yes,” Neilson said.
“I don’t think it took that long,” Lovler laughed.
“It suddenly just seemed like exactly the right thing,” said Neilson. “Being in the museum field for 30 years, I thought I knew all the museums around here. Well, I sure didn’t.”
The duo started forming their criteria for what would go in the book by looking through Neilson’s official museum directory and making some online searches.
Neilson said even though she’d already been to and even worked with some of the places in “Cultural Sites,” like the Spanish Military Hospital Museum in St. Augustine, writing the book allowed her to get to know the owners and stories behind each of the places in ways she hadn’t before.
“[After] going another step deeper and then another step deeper into places I thought I already knew, and when I found out such interesting facts, I just had to include them in the book,” she said.
Even though the project took around three years to be published, both women said they have really been working on it for a lifetime with every idea and skillset they’ve acquired to complete it.
The hardest part was stopping.
“There’s always one more touch you can put in the story,” Neilson said. “We have had a lot of people who, upon hearing what we’re writing, say, ‘Did you include this place or that place?’ And we say no, but we have to explain that there is a limit and there are probably another 100 places we could write about.”
“Cultural Sites” is Lovler and Neilson’s first finished book, but they don’t plan for it to be their last.
Lovler is already working on a memoir titled “Journalists Don’t Shoot” about her time reporting as a foreign correspondent. Neilson, who’s raised hundreds of butterflies every summer for the past 30 years, is writing a children’s book about caterpillars and butterflies.
For now, readers can keep up with events for “Cultural Sites” on Lovler’s website and order their own copies of the travel guide through Amazon and UF Press.
“Places you find along the way. Those are the kinds of places we visited,” Lovler wrote in the book’s introduction. “So, look and take a wander. You might like what you see as you meander along our Florida roads. Happy trails.”