Seven Years Later

 

Here we are, seven years after my last post. On our 19th anniversary, David and I were looking at the old blog, and I thought, "I miss the Voyage of the Bloomingtonauts. Maybe I'll restart it."

Life is very different now than it was in 2015. David, Malinda, and I are living in Claremont, California, where I'm working as the Head of Cataloging & Metadata at the Claremont Colleges Library. David left his teaching job at Florida State when everyone else was leaving their jobs during the pandemic. He's in school now, working on a certificate in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages).

For our 19th anniversary, we went to our favorite California botanical garden, the LA County Arboretum. We sat on a bench by the pond and watched a huge flock of swallows swoop and dive over the water. There were turtles piled up on a rock, and a great egret stalking across the shore. "I wish we could see a peacock," I said, because the Arboretum is famous for its gorgeous, shrieking peacocks.

Then this peacock swept into view and strolled right past us, posing for pictures as it went.

Our Summer on the Road

David and I have been traveling since May, and I have been neglecting the blog a little, but here are some massive posts to make up for it. We began our summer of traveling with a trip to Amelia Island.

We stayed with my parents in a condo near the beach, and Brenda and Will flew down for the first weekend. We got to see Amelia Island's historic downtown, with all of its little shops and restaurants. Many of them are pirate-themed, because at one point in Amelia Island's history, it was inhabited by pirates.

 The Atlantic was beautiful.

We went to the beach every day.

One thing that I like about Amelia Island is all of the different historic sites it has, like this fort behind Brenda and Will.

This is Fort Clinch, which was built after the Second Seminole War and used in the Civil War.

Also, while Will and Brenda were there, we all played a lot of music. It was the first time I had really played much on my new ukulele. I tried to learn a lot of beachy music.

 We spent over a week on the island. We hiked a lot of nature trails on Amelia Island and on some of the other little barrier islands nearby.

On one trail, we hiked through a swamp. We stopped when we heard something chirping in the water. It was a pod of baby alligators, chirping as they all hopped into the water to swim over to their mother. When we saw their mother, we went on down the trail quickly.

 We saw the beach at sunrise.

And in the evening.

We went on an amazing kayak trip where we paddled through a huge school of cannonball jellyfish.

We went bird-watching in the salt marshes.

We saw the fat little marsh rabbits hopping in and out of the reeds. They were the first rabbits David and I had ever seen in Florida.

We saw tricolored herons ...

... and great blue herons. And we saw two roseate spoonbills: two little pink dots flying in the distance.

One evening, we played a game of miniature golf ...

... on this really cool course.

 One day it rained and we drove into Jacksonville for the day to visit one of our favorite bookstores, the Chamblin Book Mine. Also, I got some new glasses, because mine had been lost in the sea the day we went kayaking.

One day we went to Blackrock Beach on Big Talbot Island. It has all of these twisty, salt-bleached driftwood trees on it.

But the strangest thing about the beach are these rare geological formations, which look like black rocks, but are really densely packed sand and peat.

Mom and I walked along the beach and looked at all of the tidepools and sea creatures. Little striped sea snails clung to the beached trees. In the shallows, a blue crab was eating a cannonball jelly. An osprey flew overhead with a shining fish clutched in its talons.'

A live olive shell plowed a track in the sand, waving its proboscis.

After Amelia Island, David and I went home for a few days to prepare for a much longer trip.

A Week on the Road

Our spring break trip went by so fast that we barely had time to take pictures. We started out visiting our family in the mountains of Virginia.

Then we drove through the snow ...

... and the sun ...

 ... to visit our family in Indiana. Our trip to Bloomington was action-packed. We had brunch with Jennifer, John, and Rowan; lunch with TammyJo, Tom, and Fox; dinner with Mimi; we watched an IU game with Nola; we played guitar and sang with Will and Brenda; we went on walks and watched movies and sorted through boxes.

But the only thing I took pictures of was this amazing morning when Mom and I went birdwatching at Stillwater Marsh.

We were there just after the sunrise, and we saw hundreds of migrating ducks: coots, buffleheads, mallards, scaups, ring-necked ducks, redheaded ducks -- birds I'd never even heard of before. And we saw six tundra swans!

The marsh was beautiful.

In Indiana, spring flowers were just starting to bloom.

Steinhatchee and St. Mark's

This weekend I went with a friend to the Steinhatchee Fiddler Crab Festival.

Steinhatchee is on a river that flows into the Gulf, and they have an art and music festival that also celebrates the inedible but ubiquitous fiddler crab. There were people in crab costumes and a crab race.

But we were really there to shop the art fair, which was really nice, and much bigger than I expected (and than this picture shows).

I didn't buy any art. I did buy a lot of citrus fruit.

It was the free samples. They were so delicious! I came home with a quarter bushel of red oranges, a quarter bushel of pummelos, and a bag of sweet kumquats.

I ate all of the kumquats in about two days. I should have bought three bags!

It was also really nice to hang out by the Steinhatchee River.

The next day, David and I went to St. Mark's Wildlife Refuge. Even though it was unusually cold.

We spent most of our time looking at this marshy lake.

 It was full of all kinds of birds, including lots of American Coots.

But the most spectacular thing was this flock of egrets (with some coots in there, I think).

It keeps going! There must have been a hundred of them.

 We also saw an alligator.

More and more birds arrived at the lake as the sun started to set.

Then we watched the sunset.