Soon after Carl left for his TDY to Mauritania, the kids and I made a
trip over to Florida to visit Mimi and Poppaw.
While we have lots of friends in Texas, it’s still nice to see some of
our friends in Florida too. We visited
our former church in Cantonment and then made our way over to Navarre Beach to
spend some time building sandcastles, swimming, and looking for shells (one of
our favorite pastimes). Although it
rained the first couple of days we were there, the sun eventually came out and
we were able to enjoy the sand and sea.
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| Navarre Beach |
We were able to spend some time visiting with some friends that I had
not seen since moving to Texas. Overall, we had a great time and found a ton of
awesome shells, caught crabs, and even a few small fish. Katelynn already talks
about returning to the beach. After a
week or so at the beach, the kids returned to Pensacola with Mimi and Poppaw to
attend VBS while I got some much needed relaxing time alone. I will admit it did get a little quiet…
amazing how quickly you miss the chaos once it’s gone!
We traveled to Brevard, NC on July 19 for a trip to the mountains with
Mimi and Poppaw. This is Todd's third
time and Katelynn’s second time visiting the area and its one of Todd’s
favorite places. We rented a house in
Brevard and enjoyed catching fireflies at night. Brevard is located in Transylvania County, NC and area known as
"the land of waterfalls." We
hiked to 7 different waterfalls and were able to get fairly close to all of
them. Katelynn was a trooper and hiked
to all of the waterfalls with hardly any help. The weather was absolutely gorgeous and cool. We picnicked everyday and played in the
streams and hunted for rocks. The area had
received a good amount of rain recently, so the waterfalls were full and
rushing.
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| Moore's Cove Falls |
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| Daniel's Ridge Falls |
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| Slick Rock Falls |
We spent most of our time in Pisgah National Forest and a portion of
our time on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Sliding
Rock is a natural water slide well known in the area. The temperature of the water at Siding Rock is
a cool 54 degrees. Todd and Poppaw
braved the temperatures and went down Sliding Rock one time. They are nuts!
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| Todd and Poppaw going down Sliding Rock!! |
One of the days, we went mining for gems at a place called Gem
Mountain. We started out with a 5 gallon
bucket of rocks and sifted through them and found many gems including garnets,
rubies, amethysts, sapphires, emeralds, sodalite, quartz, citrine, and
amazonite. The kids had a blast! On our last full day, we strolled around the quaint town of Brevard,
NC. We went to an old fashioned soda
shop and had an awesome chocolate malt (yum!).
We’ve been sending pictures to Carl of all the yummy food we’re
enjoying, but realized it was a little mean since he’s limited on what’s
available in Mauritania. We also visited
the famous O.P. Taylor's Toy Store. This
toy store has every kind of toy imaginable.
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| O.P. Taylor's toy store |
Our last stop was Ernie's Rock Shop where Todd picked out a geode and
helped the rock man cut the geode. Todd
was the first person to see what was inside his geode and he is quite proud of
it.
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| Todd helping the rock man cut his geode |
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| Todd's geode with quartz inside |
As I write this, we are heading back to Pensacola and already miss our
daily hikes to waterfalls. We will be
driving back to Texas on Thursday where Mimi will be riding with us and keeping
the kids while I go a MOPs leadership retreat at Lake Conroe – supposed to be
really pretty out there.
Countdown to when Carl comes home: 25 days!!!
