Some years ago quite a bit of acreage was added to Crowders Mountain State Park. This is generally the place I go when I can't find the time to head to the real mountains in the western side of the state. Instead I'll take a 30-minute drive south and hit the monadnocks we call Crowders Mountain and Kings Pinnalce. However, the fact that the park is so close to a large urban area means that it has a tendency to be crowded, even on weekdays. For me, the park is a hit or miss opportunity. I rarely see much in the way of wildlife there (outside of turkey vultures), so I don't visit it for wildlife photography. What I do head there for is to see some unbroken forest patches and to have some vertical relief to hike. One of the peaks (Kings Pinnacle) can give give you almost one thousand feet of climb from base to summit. Alas, I tend to have to share the peak with scores of other people--sometimes hundreds--so I rarely get the chance to find any solitude there. Today, though, I decided to finally visit what is called the 'Boulders Access' area of the park. I'm not sure how long that section has been opened, but for me it was a new experience. I got out my map of the park and found out how to get there from I-85 and drove over. I figured, from my experiences with the main part of the park, that I'd be hiking with a couple of dozen other people moving up and down the trails. To my surprise, the entire parking lot was empty when I arrived. In addition, during the 2.5 hours that I spent hiking the Ridgeline Trail and scrambling around on the boulders for which the area is named, I didn't see anyone else. I didn't hear anyone else. At one point I heard a couple of dogs barking from 300 feet below on the Piedmont farmland, but not a sign of another person. One more thing that I liked about this part of Crowders is that it's far enough away from I-85 that I couldn't hear the drone and roar of that superhighway. There were times when all I could hear was the wind in the trees and songbirds singing away. That was also very cool. While I had no plans to do any rock scrambling, a couple of the giant boulders had routes that were easy enough that I could resist the temptation to climb them. I was very, very careful, though. I'll be 62 years old in four days, so I know my years of tossing my body to risk should be far behind me. Especially considering how isolated I was with no other hikers on the trail. But I did it and had a good time. Too much caution makes a man into a coward, I reckon.
The big-ass boulder right across from one of the big-ass boulders I climbed.
The office and rest room. The offices were closed, but the rest rooms were open. The big parking lot was utterly empty except for my truck.
After some rock scrambling I took a break for lunch and to re-hydrate.
The view from atop one of the really big boulders. If you embiggen this photo you will see a low blue line on the horizon--some of the real mountains far to the west of us.
When I was younger I was a constantly angry fellow. I was in many fights. Too many to recount or even recall. I was punched in the nose enough times that my nasal passages are damaged. I suppose that this is not unusual, as I was born and raised in the United States of America which--let's all admit it--thrives on a culture that is not only violent, but displays it at a level that I can only describe as hyper-violent. Looking back on the books that I have read as a young adult, the comics I consumed as a child, and the movies and TV shows I watched I can only conclude that this nation eats the idea of violence as if it is food. It is, apparently, a sustenance with which the USA cannot otherwise exist. When I was younger I not only had no problem absorbing this nihilistic garbage, I actually enjoyed it. The more self-righteous monstrosity displayed on the page or screen, the better I seemed to accept the vile message. The system does this. It has been created and perfected and honed to such a fine edge that it now just flows along, working almost like the legendary perpetual motion machine dispensing gore and perceived justice. But now I am an old man. I can no longer stomach this poisonous shit. I first noticed this one day when I was working on a new novel and arrived at a point where I had to pen a scene of violence that I had plotted but had yet to write. As the moment came nearer in my daily routine of working, my progress slowed. I almost got to the point of writer's block but eventually the scene had to be written. And I couldn't do it. I sat there and stared at the computer screen and just by Jove could not proceed. And it was not because I was faced with some kind of psychic block that prevented me from going on. It was just that I at last could not stomach the thought of one more instance of bloodletting. Not on the page. Not on a screen. Not even by thought. And certainly not created by me. I was done with it. Since that time I find it very difficult--and sometimes impossible--to watch a movie or television show that is awash in that trash. And this, of course, makes it hard for me to watch much in the way of pop culture. Even most of the so-called "adult" comic books produced in these modern times are corrupted so heavily with violence that they almost make me want to puke when I see them. Books swim in it. Movies and TV series have rivers of blood and mountains of corpses. They display long moments of adoring torture as if we're supposed to enjoy it. You can have it all. I don't want to see it or read another jot of it. And it all has a purpose, of course. Of that I have absolutely no doubt. Raise a child on it and they are far more accepting of whatever message of violence and political propaganda you wish to feed them until they are of age and capable of striking out in misguided vengeance. Just point the way to the "bad guy" and the idea becomes reality. Western culture, at long last, is so vile and poisonous that even I--a man raised in it and inured to it--have had my fill. Yes, I read it growing up. I watched it. I even wrote it. But now my disgust of it all is overwhelming and you folk who still need it have my undying pity and contempt.
The USA is a really big country. Fourth largest on Earth by land area. (Behind only Russia, Canada, and China in case you want to know). As such, it has a ridiculously varied topography with just crazy amounts of beautiful and unique landscapes. Since my life has been a kind of race to see as much of this gorgeous nation as possible on the salary of a working class laborer, I have not seen as much of it as I want, but more of it than most people I know. However, there are strange little corners and out of the way geographical eddies that I want to see but have so far not been able. I figured I'd write about a few of these locations as my wife and I make currently vague, but increasingly more detailed plans to see them. For some reason one of the spots I want to visit is foremost in my mind. The reason for this involves just reading about this geologically interesting spot, but also an image I saw that weirdly corresponded to a recurring dream I used to have as a young man. The dream was simple. I was at the foot of a huge granite dome of a mountain and just beginning a hike to the summit. The weather in the dream was always sunny and the mountain was always rather bare and imposing. My suspicion is that the dream was inspired by childhood visits to see Stone Mountain just outside Atlanta, but the real Stone Mountain never corresponded to the images in my dreams. However, one day in researching the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma I saw a photo of Quartz Mountain/Baldy Point...and damned if it did not look exactly like the mountain that had featured so prominently in my old recurring dream! (I haven't had a repeat of that dream in decades, in case you're wondering.)
Baldy Point (aka Quartz Mountain) the carbon copy of a mountain I used to see in my dreams. (Photo by Allen Ellis, from Summitpost.)
When Carole retires in two years we are likely going to sell our Casita travel trailer. We love that trailer, but we have discovered that on trips that exceed two weeks in length we begin to get a bit stir-crazy using it. A wonderful trailer, and I am not knocking it, but we realized that we will need a slightly bigger travel trailer when we do hit the roads for trips of one to two months, which we are going to take when Carole retires. So, one of our first trips west we are going to try to fit in a stay in at least a couple of locations at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. The place has some great camping and hiking opportunities, and I will definitely scramble to the summit of Baldy Point, aka Quartz Mountain. If you're curious, just do an Internet search on the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma. It's a series of funky little granite summits, the highest of which break 2,000 feet above sea level. To me, they present a fascinating and impressively rugged terrain of peaks and canyons. It doesn't hurt that there is quite a variety of animals roaming the area, including elk, bison, longhorn cattle, prairie dogs, ringtails, coyotes, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and other critters. (They even tried unsuccessfully to reintroduce the pronghorn.) At any rate, even if I'd never had those weirdly pleasant recurring dreams featuring what I figured was a mountain merely a product of my youthful imagination, I would still very much want to see these strange, out of place mountains. They remain very high on my bag-list of interesting locations.
It is June, the Bradbury month. Most people think of October when they consider Ray Bradbury. Not I. June is the month that I discovered Ray Bradbury. School was out and it was Atlanta-hot outside where I played in the sun most of the day, running through the green forests of Decatur, the suburban town where we lived. There were creeks everywhere. Full of salamanders and leeches, turtles and snakes. The old Confederate village had long since covered the cotton fields with streets of homes, but the green land was still all around us, a patchwork of forested yards and greenways snaking along the banks of the creeks that led everywhere, from neighborhood to neighborhood, endless journeys and new sights. My days of running, chasing, pursuing all that is fun--my hours of Creme-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes. June was the month--school gone and twelve weeks of vacation begun--when my mom had brought home a book to give to me: THE ILLUSTRATED MAN. So, through Alice Kurtz Smith, that book, that author, that voice found me. Before THE OCTOBER COUNTRY grabbed my breath, I already knew who Bradbury was because of my mother, and because of the lazy days of June. June is Bradbury for me. It is the month of my birth. June is when I married Carole Henderson. That first month of summer is when my son came into the world. June is when I first put my feet to a long backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail, only seven years after I held THE ILLUSTRATED MAN in my eight-year-old hands, thus continuing my love of the green around us, of Mother Nature. I have always thought of this month--this 30 days of warmth and sun, of golden light, of sweating skin, of dusty ground, of green stains on my denims as I cracked up on my Stingray bike careening down hills overgrown with tall grass; it is long day's adventures following creeks, catching crawdads, skipping stones, barreling into the neighborhood drug store to see if the latest issue of Star Spangled War Stories and the War that Time Forgot is on the shelf. June--hours from morning until night spent mainly out of doors, coming home only for lunch, maybe to read a short story or a Jack Kirby comic book, and then out again, chasing friends, riding bikes, wandering the blocks to see what is what. Bradbury Month, I tell you. Bright and warm. Sunny and damp with threatening rain, dark clouds, playgrounds. June is romance just a few years later. Sitting by a lake, holding my soon-to-be-wife. Later still, June is cradling my tiny son in my arms, never ceasing to lift him up and hold him just so until the day he no longer wants me to carry him around and then those later June days I just watch over him, and smile, my June boy. The month of June. The days of Bradbury. The song that speaks long after that first encounter, that chilling, disturbing, amazing, June voice. My month. Bradbury days.
Mead Road, the street of my childhood, my Bradbury neighborhood, my Illustrated Days packed with color, and life, and love.
One thing that I no longer do is submit short stories to various markets. There are a number of reasons for this. A lack of desire, or execution of creating short stories is not among the reasons. I still plot and write stories from time to time, but the sad fact is that there is a lack of markets for me, and so the stories remain locked away in my computer and on various thumb drives. The biggest problem these days is the mentioned absence of markets. There are plenty of places to sell stories that are in the amateur and semi-pro marketplace. However, these places pay little or nothing and are mainly in electronic format only. I don't want to write to have my work appear for no payment (or even token payment) and I don't care for ephemeral electronic media. Because of this, such markets aren't a place for me and I do not submit my work there. Next comes the biggest problem. Starting a few years back I found myself blacklisted by a number of editors and publishers due to my political and social stands. There is no room, apparently, for people who don't toe the current popular line in such matters. I saw my prospects vanish instantly when I finally became sickened over the things I saw, and wrote about my honest feelings. Almost immediately, editors refused to look at my work out of hand, and word went out to bar me from various markets. Requests for submissions from me--which had been vigorous before--disappeared. So it goes. These days the only option that has generally been left to me is self-publishing; but I detest the self-published marketplace as a wasteland of trash and shit. Because of this I have largely avoided the self-published scene except mainly to promote other published work (such as my WORKING CLASS HERO project), and to re-publish my out of print novels. I don't expect this situation to change, and so my short story production, which was once vigorous, has been reduced to zero published tales. Oh, well. There's nothing to be done for it. I think the last time any of my stories saw print was in my collection A CONFEDERACY OF HORRORS from Hippocampus Press. You can buy a copy in ebook format, and in print format, with a brilliant cover by Pete von Sholly.
I have a very nice large, flat-screen television. We have a complement of streaming movie and TV show services. Somewhere around here I even still have a DVD player that I very rarely use. The thing is, I almost never use even the television. We're getting ready to cancel most of our subscriptions to various services via our cable (we still have cable and not satellite, although that may change soon as that formerly modern device seems to be justifiably dying off). And the reason, honestly, is that we very rarely turn on the TV. We will go--and I am not exaggerating--weeks without using the damned thing. So why pay for services that we use so rarely? I can't tell you when the last time I went to televised news for information. I just don't do it. The very act is pointless. And I loathe pretty much all of the drama and comedy shows promoted for popular consumption when I encounter them. There might be something there I would enjoy, but by and large so much of it is relegated to subscription services that I'm just not going to victimize myself to this ploy of economic vampirism. So. We're moving toward getting rid of all but the most basic of Internet services. What we're going to end up with is a WiFi connection whereby we can access streaming video. If we want to sample something, then it'll be there at what we consider a fair or bargain price. No more signing up for services we rarely use, and no more pissing away our hard-earned dollars. I long ago lapsed into getting most of my news through foreign sources that I access via the Internet. And I cannot tell you the last time I followed a network television show. Decades, likely, as I haven't been a fan of such things since my days as a teenager back in the 1970s. Frankly, I just don't know what the attraction is toward modern pop culture. Admittedly, I am not hip to such matters. And, frankly, I just don't care. And it has occurred to me on more than one occasion that as I bemoan the death of things like bookstores, and the periodical comic book, and the wealth of daily newspapers, perhaps there is a current crop of 30-somethings who decry the extinction of early video game consoles, Saturday morning cartoons, and rock music. Recently, on our eleven-day vacation to celebrate my recent retirement from the grinding 40-hour workweek, we noted that we did not once set up our television in our travel trailer. Carole and I talked about it, not because we felt like watching a movie or viewing what passes as news in the USA, but because we had not one iota of desire to do so. The little flat screen stayed in its cupboard storage and we read books during our downtime relaxing from a day of sightseeing or kayaking or hiking. And that's the thing. We both still read. Books are what we generally retreat to for entertainment and relaxation and education. Yes, I admit that I sometimes use an e-reader of some type, but even there we both prefer real books made of bound paper. I suppose, in that way, we are among the last of a dying breed, soon to lapse into extinction. And that's okay. I really don't want to live in a world without bookstores, and without the people who grew up reading print books. As I wind down this mortal coil, I am struck by the things that I no longer chase. I may write of them this week. Or I may not. For now, Carole and I are planning our next trips. Except for June, which is full of things like Father's Day, my son's birthday, my birthday, and our wedding anniversary (our 35th!), we plan to be camping or travelling elsewhere on a pretty much monthly basis. I've been waiting for decades to be able to do this kind of thing. We've found a couple of mountain locations that look attractive for both July and August. I'll post photos when we've logged those trips into our history.
I'd much rather explore this trail (which I did), or plan a trip to another such wild place, than bother with a TV show. I will be doing more and more of this as my active life builds up (and then, inevitably, winds down).
What's around the next bend in the river? I'll find out.
I miss out on a lot of wildlife photos because I mainly photograph wildlife from a great distance. You just either cannot, or should not get very close to many types of animal in their natural habitat. For instance, all of the photos that I have taken of grizzly bears have been from a great distance. And since I don't have a really effective telephoto lens, all of my shots of griz have been grainy. Here are a couple of examples of frustrating instances of trying to get photos of, first, an alligator catching and eating a prey animal; and a strange-looking osprey who had just caught a large fish. In both cases I'd have been able to get some decent detail if only I'd had a much better telephoto lens. In each case, the distance from which I was taking the photos was from well over 100 meters. I just couldn't capture exactly what I needed to see. Yes, I am currently shopping for some better telephoto lenses. I have a couple picked out and will probably buy them over the next few months. Even a halfway decent lens costs more than I paid for my new camera. So the expense is somewhat daunting. But if I'm going to take better photos of wild animals, I must have a couple of good lenses.
I noticed this alligator in the Upper Myakka Lake because she had risen to the surface and was struggling to swallow something. From the distance I was at (a lake tour boat) I couldn't see what she was trying to eat. At first I thought it was a cormorant or anhinga. But once I got to shore and expanded the photo I could see that it was a very primitive looking fish (almost something like a lobefin!) that I assume is a catfish of some sort?
It was interesting how the alligator bowed its body by lifting its head and tail out of the water to position the large fish for swallowing. (By then the gator had changed position so that I was seeing the opposite side of its head..)
The next photo is of an unusual looking osprey that I watched as it splashed into the lake to catch a fish (an invasive talapia). As I'd watched the osprey in flight there was nothing strange about the raptor at all. It flew normally and dived into the water and came back up moving naturally. But when I looked at the first image I got there seemed to be something trailing from the left wing. Had it picked up some water weed in the lake? Was it a loose wing feather? It just looked very weird.
It was only in taking a good look at the second photo in the series that I saw that this osprey has a left wing that is much, much longer than the right wing. So that was the culprit of the weirdness of the first image. Whatever the source of the difference in lengths of the bird's wings, it obviously has no influence on its ability to fly or to hunt. But it does make me wonder how this happened. Was it due to an injury as a tiny nestling? Result of a mutation? Is this common in ospreys?
These pair of instances, taken quite actually just minutes apart in the wildlife-rich Myakka River State Park, illustrated to me that I must buy a couple of new telephoto lenses. Until I buy such lenses, my wildlife photography will continue to be limited.
I'll be creating some videos from the trip to camp in Florida. The first one is actually from the last part of the trip--to Hillsborough River State Park. We had a generally good time at Hillsborough, but the experience was tempered somewhat due to the authoritarian manner in which the park is managed. The rangers tended to be douchebags for no reason, trolling through the campground and along the park road looking for anything that might constitute a reason for admonition. A couple of the rangers looked like they were not enjoying this opportunity to be assholes, so my suspicion is that their top manger has brought the hammer down so that they act like soup Nazis. I understand that a park like this needs to be managed carefully and effectively, but one can go to extremes. This one has obviously gone overboard on enforcement to the point where it looks like they actually want to make the park less attractive for visitors. That's one way to lessen human impact, I suppose. One thing about the park that I did like is that it obviously employs a lot of local people. From groundskeepers to rangers and clerks, that place was busy with salaried employees. A good way to spend tax money, as far as I'm concerned. We were pleasantly surprised to see that the park was very quiet and peaceful and uncrowded during the weekdays. Carole and I were able to hike park trails and encounter very few other hikers, which made for wonderful solitude. It's great to be able to walk about and experience the forest and rivers without other people tramping about, talking, and generally making too much noise.
Forest canopy along the trail beside the Hillsborough River.
The Class II rapids on the river.
Our campsite. Plenty of room. Complete with our Clam screenhouse.
Paddling along the Hillsborough River.
I counted seven alligators during our paddle trip. So there were probably ten times that many I couldn't see.
Carole on the suspension bridge over the Hillsborough River. Hike beyond and you come to the trails into the back country.
Picnic shelter and retaining wall. This was where we put into the river, just a very short distance from our campsite.
Carole and I started our vacation down to Florida (we go roughly once per year) by hooking up the Casita travel trailer, loading all of our various supplies onto the truck, and heading out about 8:00 pm on a Wednesday. What we generally do when we choose to start late that way is to drive as far as I feel comfortable (until I get too tired to drive) and then pull into a state rest area and park to get a few hours of sleep in the trailer. We tried this at a rest area near the SC/GA border and there was no space due to the fact that long-haul truckers had taken up all of the space. Which is okay, because you don't want a hard working truck driver falling asleep at the wheel. So, we drove down into Georgia and stopped at first one, and then another state rest area, finding both of them also taken over by the big rigs. After that I kept my eyes peeled for a Cracker Barrel Restaurant, as I'd read they didn't mind RV folk parking overnight in their lot since most such folk wake up, go inside, and order breakfast. Ironically, we ended up pulling into a Cracker Barrel in my hometown of Brunswick GA around 1:00 am or so. And we slept there, got up in the morning, and had breakfast in the restaurant. Then we made all safe haste to get on down to St. Petersburg and the Pinellas County administered Fort DeSoto Park. We'd been to the park twice before--the first time having discovered it completely by accident while driving around--and it never ceases to amaze me. The infrastructure in the park is of the highest quality: roads, parking lots, ocean/bay access, docks, bath facilities, campgrounds, offices, historical structures, picnic areas, etc. It's hard to believe that it's a county park and not a full-fledged state park. It exists on about 1400 acres shared between several islands connected by narrow causeways. If you like bird life, this is your place. Well over 300 recorded species of birds make this park at least a temporary stopping off point. There are decent numbers of resident ospreys--a bird which I dearly love to watch and photograph. I found out on this trip that there are now several nesting pairs of Bald eagles, but I didn't see any of them. Unlike on our last trip, we brought our kayaks with us. While you can rent kayaks and canoes in the park, we like to bring our own. We put in at one of the spots along the bayou near our campsite (site #100) and paddled around observing the bird life and aquatic creatures who made their presence known from time to time. We were lucky enough to encounter two manatees, but as the water in the lagoon is a bit turbid, I only got a couple of photos when one of the big mammals came to the surface to get a breath of air. As for the campground: it is huge. It offers 238 sites, all with electric and water hookups. Most of the sites have lots of vegetation on either side, giving you a plenty of privacy. And there are many live oaks with their sheltering branches offering shade. Many sites are waterfront, either on the lagoon, or on the bay allowing access to the Gulf. There are extremely nice bathhouses sprinkled through the campground with flush toilets, sinks, hot showers, and laundry facilities. (The laundry prices went up quite a lot since our last visit so it's a bit pricey to wash and dry a load of clothes compared to our previous trip.) One thing that is unique about this park is that you feel as if you are far away from cities and traffic, but you have to drive through St. Petersburg to get to the park (tolls to get in total $1.75). We had picked a day to go into St. Pete to have breakfast, visit the Salvador Dali Museum, hit some shops, have supper, and then go back to the campground. Normally we don't do city-stuff on our vacations, but because of the campground's proximity to the city and all that it offers, we made an exception. My only complaints about the trip have nothing whatsoever to do with the park itself, or with the city. But I have noticed on my last three vacations to Florida that the amount and diversity of wildlife has diminished. This could be just the luck of the roll and we've merely hit some bare patches in the continuity. But I have been disturbed to note that I am not seeing the numbers and varieties of wild animals that we normally encounter when in the state. Bottom line: you could do a whole lot worse than booking a camping vacation at Fort DeSoto Park. But if you do want to stay there, book well in advance. We had to book our site five months before we used them, and were lucky to get the site that we wanted.
Our site (#100). Directly across from the bathhouse and laundry.
The bathhouse in our section of the campground with accompanying amazing oak.
Our spot at North Beach. We think this is the best of the beaches in the Park. There's a big sandbar just off the beach that becomes accessible at lower tides and you can wade or swim out to look for seashells and sea critters. No crowds on the weekdays--stupendously crowded on Saturdays and Sundays.
One of the trails I hiked on the island.
A pterodactyl...I mean Brown pelican that sailed over me on its way somewhere else.
Part of the park's namesake: Fort DeSoto. Built during the Spanish-American War when we took most of Spain's colonies away from them. The fort was armed and manned (along with the one on Egmont Key), but of course they never saw any battles.
An inner section of the fort.
Me, lounging on one of the big mortars/cannons/whatever.
A great egret that I photographed as it caught (and then ate) a small pufferfish (which you can see in its beak).
I don't know anyone in this photo. they were just in my way when I took this composite image of the Salvador Dali Museum building. Designed by Yann Weymouth, it is sometimes called "The Enigma".
When I was a kid I would read accounts of how Catholic colonists had exterminated the indigenous peoples of South America. But when I looked at the population numbers of indigenous tribes in South America I discovered that there are twenty-four million of them still there to this day. And that there are over one hundred and twenty-five million people who are mestizo (that is, people who are genetically of indigenous origin, but who have lost the native culture--language, customs, religion, art, etc) and were absorbed into the Spanish language and Catholic religion. These are hardly what I would call "extermination" numbers. So all the stories of how the Catholics committed wholesale genocide against the native peoples are...well...bullshit. And, yet, here in North America, where the Protestants held sway (north of Mexico)--that's where the mass murder and acts of genocide and human extermination of the indigenous peoples actually did take place. Today, in the USA and Canada, there are only a few millions of indigenous people. Only 4% of Canadians and 1% of USA citizens are of the First Nations. Now, I am neither a Protestant nor a Catholic. I'm not defending one, nor am I attacking the other. All I am saying is that you shouldn't take things as stated, or written. Investigate. Look for evidence. Seek as much of the truth as you can. Because a whole lot of the so-called history I read as a kid has turned out to be lies, bullshit, and pure propaganda.
Evo Morales, President of Bolivia and member of the Aymara indigenous nation (and a Catholic--at least for social purposes). Photo from Latino Life, UK.
Vacation time is drawing near, so I took Carole's kayak out of the barn where we hang it when it's not in use. It was dirty so I hosed it down and scrubbed the hull. Also I checked the spot where I sealed a small leak and it's in good shape. The resin did its job. Tomorrow I'll take mine down and make sure it's clean and ready to go. Not much longer till we head out for our first trip of the Spring/Summer season. We're probably going to sell my kayak this summer and buy a tandem model. We'll keep Carole's excellent Wilderness Pungo for when our son wants to go kayaking with us. We decided a couple of years ago that we wanted to switch to a tandem kayak, but we've either just been too busy working to shop for one, or it wasn't in the budget. Recently, though, we have been able to look around and eyed a number of them. For a while we were going to get a sit-on-top model, but we have opted to get a conventional type. And, again, we'll go for the Wilderness kayak--we have really been impressed with Carole's (it tracks exceptionally well) so the company sold us on design and general quality.
Carole ahead of me when we paddled Holmes Creek in Florida in 2017.
Carole out in the bay at Gulf Shores National Seashore (also in 2017). That's her kayak in the foreground and my Perception model on the left.
Well, retirement has pretty much kicked in. The official date is still a few weeks away, but there will be no more eight-hour-a-day grind for me. I did get a part-time job that I will work 20-25 hours a week. Three-day weeks, tops. It never hurts to have extra money for travel and to buy doo-dads that I want for my photography hobby. Last month I bought a new camera and now I want to start picking up nicer lenses. Over the next eight months Carole and I have planned seven trips, all with our Casita travel trailer. These will pretty much all be within more local states (NC, SC, VA, WV, TN, GA); but we are heavily leaning toward a camping trip to Pennsylvania. I think it would be nice to visit Gettysburg. We'll see if we can firm up the plans. The only month that we probably won't go anywhere is June. That's a busy month for us. We have our 35th wedding anniversary, my son's birthday, my birthday, and Father's Day. All of that will keep us busy sticking close to home. At any rate, I made it. All the way until retirement. Hopefully I won't croak anytime soon. Recently an old friend of mine died a week before he was to begin retirement. The second I saw all of that happen, I realized that there was no way I was going to try to punch the clock for even one more year. I'd like to enjoy a few years of the kinds of adventure I want to take and not suffer one more day of the grind of working for either corporate or federal pay-masters (both of which I have done).
Taken on a camping trip. This, and all of the photos that follow, were taken on camping trips. Lots more camping ahead for us!
