Friday, 28 May 2021

No Tropical Paradise

Alabama man Richard J McGuire is a man who likes camping ....

Discovery Island
No Tropical Paradise For Some .....

He particularly likes to camp in wild bits of paradise.

However the world is getting smaller for this sort of adventure, and those wild but still safe spots, rarer and harder to find. So when he spotted a small sub tropical island off the Florida coast that was unoccupied, he couldn't resist crossing the small strip of sea, and setting up his idyllic camp site.

Unfortunately the island 11-acre zoological park, with aromatic trees, that he had chosen for his holiday sojourn, was owned by a large corporation, that, although it had abandoned the property in 1999, still had a proprietorial interest in the island. The island had formerly been named 'Discovery Island,' and the corporation was the mighty Disney empire.

Urban Explorer or Trespasser?
Richard J McGuire - Urban Explorer or Trespasser?

All the Disney parks had been closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic so its not entirely clear how Mr McGuire had made it past the parks security, and remained oblivious to where he was, even though the island is peppered with messages warning against trespass .... but that detail aside, the island had been left to fall in to rack and ruin, and decayed for the last 21 years. 

However one mans rack and ruin, was another mans ideal camping site .... but a security representative for Disney told deputies she had seen a man using a boat earlier that day, and that the area was closed to the public, so the Orange County police arrived and arrested Mr McGuire for illegally camping on private property. Mr McGuire told the authorities that he hasn't known it was a restricted site, and described it as "a tropical paradise".

Initially Mr McGuire had told the authorities that he had reached the island on Monday or Tuesday to go camping, and that he planned to stay there for “approximately one week,” But when charged, Mr. McGuire denied that he was camping on the island, and said he was there as an urban explorer recording video footage for his YouTube channel.

Its not known if Disney have future plans for the island.

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