Dinner & A Cinema … and Lunch with New Friends

Fort Pickens Campground — Gulf Islands National Seashore (GINS), Florida
Temps: Lo TBD / Hi 71F (TBD / 22C)

The cold front that kept the area to our west 20 degrees cooler yesterday has arrived here. The day’s high of 71F (22C) was back in the wee hours of the morning. The temp has been falling since then. At 8:00p, we’re already down to 50F (10C); we’ll see where it stops. I guess mother nature is preparing us for our trek north from here.

This cold front came with plenty of rain to give us a good soaking. I was about to step out for a walk while Mui was off running errands this morning when the skies opened up in a downpour. That was about 8:00a. Except for a few short breaks, the rain hasn’t stopped since. The direction and strength of the rain even caused our first leak — seepage really — in the motorhome. Looks like the water found a miniscule opening in the slide seals. Nothing serious; the carpet is already drying out.

Before you ask, the sunrise above is not from this morning; those gorgeous colors were what we woke up to yesterday, so let me go back to …

Although we had a very colorful sunrise, the sun didn’t grace Mui’s birthday! Yup; he has turned a year older. I won’t say how old, but there is a 5 and a 7 involved … you figure it out. In the meantime, the beautiful sunrise we enjoyed from our campsite deserves some more recognition … they do say that a picture is worth a thousand words.

With our departure from here just days away, we wanted to get in one more trike ride. Gearing up, we cycled over to Fort Pickens, wandered around the fortifications for a bit, and chatted at length with one of the rangers. (By the way, she confirmed that the bunker we came across on the Gulf-side beach is indeed from the coastal artillery system; probably for ammo storage.)

We spent much of the afternoon at home, just relaxing and doing some road-prep chores. Around 3:30p, we left to celebrate Mui’s birthday with an early dinner and a movie. I’d made a promise to myself not to take any more bird photos. I did OK until I spied a nesting pair of great blue herons in the trees as we were exiting the campground. Then, all bets were off. The bonus — we got to see a bit of blue skies and sunshine at that moment too.

The Great Blue Heron on the nest was displaying to the one on the branch.

Wouldn’t it be great to see the whole cycle from courting to the hatching of the eggs?

I could have stayed there watching the herons for hours, but we had other plans in the works, so after about 15 minutes we moved on.

First on the agenda was dinner at a restaurant to which Chuck and Anneke introduced us in September — McGuire’s Irish Pub. We had so enjoyed our meal there that when I asked Mui where he wanted to go for his birthday dinner, he had no doubts in his mind about returning to this eatery, which is located inside Pensacola’s original 1927 Old Firehouse.

McGuire’s bills itself as a “turn of the century New York Irish Saloon.”
[photo on the left is a screenshot from the website]

This double-decker bus sits in the parking lot;
no way you can miss it when you turn onto East Gregory Street!

The early hour meant that we did not have to wait to be seated. In fact, we had the Irish Whiskey Dining Room entirely to ourselves.

Here’s the Birthday boy, sitting beneath …

… just some of the over $1 million in dollar bills signed by Irishmen of all nationalities.
(We’ll have to go back to add our dollar to the collection!)

Can’t say that our meal was healthy, but it sure was good. Since this was a celebratory meal, we threw caution to the wind and ordered separate main courses. In the absence of “naked” fish and chips, I opted for the regular kind (the dory was so flaky that I didn’t need a knife); Mui got McGuire’s ale battered shrimp, which came with a large Caesar salad and a choice of sides … the homemade garlic mashed potatoes was so good that we had to bring the leftovers home with us. Of course, we got the 18¢ bowl of Senate bean soup to start — so much better than the bean soup served in the Senate cafeteria in DC. When we asked our server for a dessert recommendation, Jerri suggested the Irish Bash Cream Pie — think along the lines of a very light cheesecake with chocolate mousse and chocolate cake crumbles … she definitely did not steer us wrong.

Top left: fresh-from the oven honey glazed bread
Bottom left: fish and chips
top Right: Senate bean soup
Bottom Right: Ale battered shrimp

The deceptively light Irish bash cream pie was so good that it deserves to stand alone.

Next up … the movies. It’s been ages since we’ve been to a movie theater. I think I boycotted them when the price of a ticket topped $10. When we lived in a stix & brix, we had Netflix and got our movie-fix that way, but we canceled the service when we got on the road. We’d been wanting to see the latest Bond movie since it came out, so we decided to break our boycott. The decision was made easy because of our access to Portside Cinema, the theater at NAS Pensacola. At $3/person going to a show there is a deal to be sure. Yes, the prices are subsidized by tax payers, but considering the pay our men and women in uniform get, I think it is well-deserved.

My favorite Bond is still Sir Sean Connery, but Daniel Craig played the role well in Skyfall.

We left the movie theater in the rain, drove home with the windshield wipers working overtime, went to bed to the pitter patter of heavy drops on the roof, and woke up to pretty much nonstop rain …

Today

We did nothing special today … EXCEPT at lunch time.

Today was our day to meet Karen and Steve, fellow Phaeton owners and bloggers (Gone by RV), who first reached out to us while we were all still in Virginia. Having sold their stix & brix, they were already living in their home on wheels, but they had to wait to get on the road at the end of December, which is when Steve retired.

When Karen sent me an email that they were coming up from Panama City Beach to visit the Camping World in Gulf Breeze, we suggested meeting at Niki’s, where we had lunch with Chuck and Anneke last week. They may have regretted leaving the great weather in PCB for the soggy weather they found here, but we’re glad they came. We had a very nice time getting acquainted, and enjoyed hearing their Red Bay stories since we’ll be going there at the beginning of February. They’ll be heading up to Red Bay in late February; hope we won’t still be there, but if we are, we’ll be consoled by their good company.

I thought I was going to end the post with our luncheon date, but I have one more photo to share … this one from dinner at home.

Sharing a meal … or … two halves make one meal!
Not only are we splitting a V8 and a Panini, we’re splitting a plate too!

Tomorrow we get back on the road!

Madeleine L'Engle

I just finished reading The Summer of the Great-Grandmother by Madeleine L-Engle. It is a poignant true story of the last summer spent with her mother before her death.
She looks back on her childhood and growing up years as an only child of parents who were very cosmopolitan and well-travelled. She laments the fact that she can no longer communicate with her mother as she once did while having morning-long talks over coffee at the kitchen table.
She has to come to terms with the fact that after her mother's death, she's now the 'matriarch' of the family clan; a role she doesn't want but has to accept.
Here's a quote from the book about one thing that formed who she became as an adult. "School was mostly something to be endured; I don't think I learned nearly as much from my formal education as from the books I read instead of doing homework, the daydreams which took me on exciting adventures in which I was intrepid and fearless and graceful, the stories Mother told me, and the stories I wrote. It was in my solitudes that I had a hand in the making of the present Madeleine."
I agree with her, because that is also my experience. I've learned so much more out of school than in. Only in solitude can I work out solutions to problems, think in peace, and be creative.
If you've never read any of her books, I highly recommend them. She's probably best known for A Wrinkle in Time. I prefer her non-fiction. She was also a writer of spiritual books. In the above mentioned book, she was struggling with who God is and traditional religion, but later on she became much stronger in her faith.
*The lady in the photo isn't Madeleine L'Engle, she's an ancestor of mine, Lydia Walker.

Short wanders round Red Hook and Battery Park.

Saturday I met Peter and Kath and we went for a short walk round Red Hook, and its waterfront.

Statue of Liberty in the distance

Old warehouses by the water

View of the Verrazano Narrows and Bridge

Sunday I took the subway with Brian and Leonie and a friend, plus the kids to Battery Park Playground, in southern Manhattan, by the Hudson. Within view is the w-i-p of Freedom Tower, which is to replace the WTC twin towers. So much waterfront in this city one way and another, and they are making great use of it.Lunch in a rather typical burger place.

Kath's ceramics show is on at the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative Gallery until July 7

Weird Science

My fur-riends Olivia and Roxy sent me this link and we just had to post... enjoy! I know I learned sumpin' today!

Wind-blown snow

I was mesmerized by this scene when I came across it. The patterns in the snow created by the wind made for a nice foreground and begged for a vertical composition. The morning light and clouds were the icing on the cake!

Spring, sprung.

It's bloodroot time!
Tempus est Sanguinaria canadensis.
Babelfish doesn't work for ancient languages, so that is possibly not correct latin.
But anyway, bloodroots are up!

Cal Poly Nights

Cal Poly Nights, originally uploaded by ParsecTraveller.

Night settles in over San Luis Obispo, California.

Surprise in the driveway

Timber rattlesnake! Crotalus horridus.

A big one.

His tail was raised but he never rattled it.

He was beautiful.

And a little scary.

I really wasn't that close - this is max telephoto zooming.

I didn't realize that snakes had eyebrows.

They make him look agressive, even though he wasn't.

Do snakes bristle their scales? It seemed like he was doing that.
-----
They are sometimes called Canebreak rattlesnakes in south Alabama, but are apparently the same species.
There are six poisonous snakes in Alabama, but I've only encountered three of them. And this is only the third time I've ever seen a rattlesnake. (I've run across lots of Copperheads and Water Moccasins, a.k.a. Cottonmouths.)
I looked it up, and the eyebrow scale is called the supraocular scale.

Soaperrific

I run a small handmade soap business. Once a year, Alabama soapmakers convene for education, shopping, gabbing, and eating too much. This is known as the "big meeting". There are regional lunch meetings throughout the year, as well as a large social gathering in January. It's a friendly bunch. We started out many years ago as a group of strangers on the internet, and have now become so much more than just colleagues.

We are fragrance junkies.

There's always lots of stuff to spend money on.

We teach each other how to make things.

Vendors provide samples, catalogs, and door prizes.
The unofficial uniform includes overalls, pearls, and a tiara...

Not your run of the mill overalls.
The pearls and tiara are optional for men. We have had a few male members in the past, but somehow we've managed to run them all off.

Trails Under Water

Yesterday, I took a ride from XW shop, to Manawa, Trail Center, and return. Besides riding my bike, wanted to see how bad the trails are.
As you can see - sections of the trails are under water. When I got back to the Shop, I learned that the race had been postponed to a later weekend. The river was also way up and lots of garbage floating on the river.
Rode the new trail bike - since I had to pick it up at the shop (adjustment). Weather good, light wind, feeling good (but not the energy I had Wednesday!).

And so it goes on

I thought I'd start this entry with a pretty picture I took yesterday, because I'm not sure the other news is so good. That spot on my face was actually a Sun Spot, which isn't a skin cancer yet, but would develop into one if left alone. I suppose the good news is that I've had it zapped now, and hopefully dealt with. However, what concerns me is that I'm showing signs of skin cancer at the age of 28! Of course, someone who spends so much time outdoors in Queensland would hardly be surprised that this would be a possibility, but I use sunscreen all the time, and it's still happening, and I certainly didn't expect it to happen so soon.
On the other hand, I've read comments from people on bikejournal.com who appear to have been living with this situation for years, without suffering greatly. I guess it just means I now need to be extra vigilant in making sure I catch these things early, and apply the sunscreen even more often than what I already do! I might also think about doing more of my long rides at night this summer, too. After Thursday's effort, it's clear that I am not having a good week. Sooner or later I'll get some good news, it's just a matter of waiting.
I did, however, get a nice early ride this morning, through cool conditions up to Binna Burra in the Hinterland. A surprisingly windy morning up on the Beechmont range seemed to add to the excitement. There's something about riding along the top of a range, being buffeted by a wind with no protection at all, it's actually quite a liberating feeling. The views on both sides of the range are also stunning up there. I've been doing that ride for a decade, and it's power remains undiminished.


P.S. Apparently the forecast for Springbrook tomorrow is sleet. Sleet? In Queensland? WTF?