The good news is I found the Jack Kerouac house in Orlando. The bad news is I didn't get to see inside.

I know: Florida? Jack Kerouac lived in Florida?

In 1957, when "On the Road" was published, Kerouac came to live with his mother in Florida, in her Orlando bungalow in a quiet neighborhood called College Park. He stayed less than a year, but there, during a short and intense stretch not all that different from the one in which he composed "On the Road," he wrote "The Dharma Bums." The original manuscript of "The Dharma Bums" can be found in Orlando's Orange County Historical Museum.

To get to the house I drove around a small lake fronted by lovely older homes in beautiful condition, many two stories tall, one with a vintage car and a Porsche out front. People in boats were fishing. Then I went across a two-lane commercial road onto gridlike streets with houses that were more modest, mostly one-story midcentury concrete block houses and older bungalows. A few of these houses had been torn down for brand new two-story mini-mansions that stretched to the edge of their lots (ugh), but mostly the neighborhood gave the sense of being a community that values its existing structures. People tended gardens, spruced up paint jobs and walked with their kids and dogs under green trees.

Not everyone in College Park knows the Kerouac house. One man told me I should go to a nearby Starbucks and ask them my questions about authors. Another, however, nodded to the gray bungalow where I was standing and said, "That's the writer's house." The detailed "Do Not Disturb" note on the front door confirmed it.

The sign hadn't been posted by a private citizen tired of Kerouac hunters knocking on the door (although they do). It was put there by the Jack Kerouac Writer in Residence Project -- informally, the Kerouac Project -- a bootstrap nonprofit that keeps the house up and, just as important, funds three-month writers residencies in the house.

"I sit in the room where Kerouac wrote 'The Dharma Bums,'" said Ellie Watts-Russell, the writer who's been living in the house since March. She'd been leading a writing workshop while I was there and called me a few days later. "There’s a picture of Kerouac working on 'The Dharma Bums' in that room where I get to write. I think one of the previous writers in the goodbye book, she felt like Jack had her back when she was working."

Watts-Russell, a Brit who is amazed by the support offered writers in the U.S. with residencies like this one -- twice she marveled at not having to look at a utility bill during her three-month stay -- says there is "a real sense of passing the baton between writers." She meant that the Kerouac House has a tradition of each resident welcoming and encouraging the next, but it applies in a greater sense, too -- they're all passing the baton that launched from Kerouac's typewriter in that back room.

Because the front of the house, above, isn't exactly where Kerouac lived. Where he did is after the jump.