Travel & Places
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Florida Trail: Hickory Hammock to Hicks Slough (Avon Park Air Force Range)
This weekend, like last year, we went on a backpacking trip. This year we started off at the Hickory Hammock Florida Trail trail head on U.S. 98 between Sebring and Bassinger with the intentions of just walking north until we felt like turning around to come home. We got a late start on Friday after sleeping in a bit and then driving the two hours north. Before we left we checked the weather and weren’t too pleased with the forecast—rain and then a cold front right behind it. It didn’t start raining until we entered Lake Placid at nearly lunch time. We took some back roads to get to the…
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Shore (Love) Birds
The Wanderers on Sanibel.
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Heaven is a Place on Earth
Ok, so the title is slightly kitchy, but it came to me as Belinda Carlisle was singing to me on the way home from work today. Sanibel is heaven on Earth. It is one of the places that furthered my interest in marine biology growing up. We went to Sanibel and Fort Myers beach for vacation a few years when I was growing up and we loved it. I always thought when I moved to Florida that I would be living over there, but we never have. I hardly ever get to go, maybe once a year; it’s a good two hour drive from the house and we are often…
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Morning at Corkscrew
When we left Marc and Eliana’s house on Friday night we decided we’d meet them at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary at 7am on Saturday morning. From our house it is about an hour and a half drive and from theirs, add at least another forty-five minutes. We weren’t exactly bright eyed and bushy-tailed when we got there. It was early. Chris and I arrived first and hit the boardwalk after I downed the majority of my coffee since disposable materials aren’t allowed on the boardwalk. He set out for the cypress dome and I wanted to see what I could come up with in the fog that had rolled in across…
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I wish I was…
…still doing the Sanibel Stoop. And when you can’t stoop any longer, find a nice mound of shells, sit down and dig right in. We had an awesome weekend that continued from Marc and Eliana’s house over to the west coast at Sanibel and Cayo Costa State Park. I have so many photos to go through—I’ll have plenty to write about this week!
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Christmas
Christmas day started off a little bit on the wrong foot. A door was left open or didn’t get closed entirely when Chris left to do an early morning photographic expedition down at Everglades National Park, and three of the cats at Marc and Eliana’s escaped. We only knew about it when one of the cats, Desi, ended up in a fight with a neighborhood stray. I thought he was fighting with another cat in the living room until Eliana knocked on the bedroom door and got me out of bed to look for the third cat, Timber, that they couldn’t find. It was a long day of walking the…
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Solstice Sunset
Rarely do we get blessed with such great clouds. The strong wind on Saturday brought rippling effects to the clouds and the sunset for our hike made a beautiful ending to the day. Which one do you like best?
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Ghosts of Christmas Past
Growing up, I always thought Christmas would be the same. There would be lots of presents, good food, lounging around and lots of laughter. After I got married, Thanksgiving morphed into one of my favorite holidays and Christmas was pushed aside. Part of this was the whole sharing of families deal that comes with any married couple. The only good part about that was the families were separated by three counties, not three states. The bad part was that we had to fly out there and shuffle around. So, as I’ve gotten older Christmas has changed. Part of it is that instead of it being grey and the landscape mostly…
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10-Miles with Dad
Ahh, it is so nice to be writing again! My brother has me up and running enough to post, but we still have to work out the widgets (ie: the side archives and categories) and I’ve put everything up until this past week in the archives up there at the top. I’ll eventually re-work my banner, but until then this is what I’ve got. I will also try and fix the font size and color; I already tried to change the visited link color but it hasn’t worked yet. On Saturday, a day after my dad sat indoors while it poured the entire day and Chris and I had to…