Accidental Tourists

No sightseeing stops were planned on our way back to South Carolina as The Writer was anxious to get back to work. But when an indicator light began flashing and the tires were checked it was apparent that we needed help. The nearest town was Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Both of us went to college in Iowa (not the same college and not at the same time) and we both had some hazy memories of sports matches (tennis and volleyball) at the college in Cedar Falls.

 

While our tire was being fixed we decided to take a walk in the beautifully restored downtown.

 

 

 

The old Cotton Theatre, which opened in 1910 to bring traveling theater companies to town, was recently restored at a cost of $1.2 million and renamed the Oster Regent Theatre. It once seated 1,000 people which must have been a good share of the population of Cedar Falls at the time!

When movies became popular, the theater was purchased and turned into a movie theater.

 

I love the prairie style architecture, squat and solid, with subtle but beautiful details.

This was a 3-story department store with offices above, now housing several small shops and apartments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once a bank, now a fitness center.

 

 

 

 

Fun benches offered rest and conversation but it was too cold to stop.

The Black Hawk Hotel has continuously been a hotel since 1853.

It started out as a wood frame stage coach hotel, went through several name changes and grew larger, becoming the Black Hawk in 1918.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We enjoyed our walk and in an hour our tire was fixed and we were on our way south again.

 

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WE'RE BA-A-ACK!

So much has happened in the past two weeks my head is still spinning, though the tires have finally stopped moving. Thirty two hundred miles of driving, one tire malfunction, one car sold, one house emptied and sold, Mother's Day celebrated, lots of hugs and kisses shared and more than a few tears.

We celebrated Mother's Day at a Japanese restaurant where the boys were highly entertained by the knife-juggling chef and lots of fireworks as well as squirted water and squirted saki for the adults.

 

 

A volcano made of onion rings, filled with cooking oil, and lit on fire ...

 

 

 

 

Pretty exciting stuff!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anna and three of her boys

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daughter Sarah

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Me and The Writer

(and one little blond head)

 

 

 

 

 

And one of the twins, Aiden, made this gift for his mom for Mother's Day.

His mom's favorite colors plus GLITTER on the roof.

It could not have been a better Mother's Day celebration!

 

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On the Road Again

We have arrived in Minnesota to visit family and put my house there up for sale.

 

It was a beautiful -- but chilly -- trip through the gorgeous Smoky Mountains where The Writer and I used to live.

43 degree!

Asheville, NC. Yarn bombs on Wall Street.

 

 

We were completely lost as Asheville has changed and grown so much, including this building. Many years ago this was a cafe on this funky little street, and I owned it with two friends. However, I walked straight up to this building as if in a dream and said to The Writer, this is it!

And it was!

It's a ceramics store now, but you can still see where the kitchen and dining room were.

Good memories of wonderful customers and great friends!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On through Kentucky and more beautiful mountain views, even though it rained Some. This is crossing the bridge in Louisville. Looking up the river to the left, I counted seven bridges in sight spanning the Ohio River.

 

 

 

Things changed dramatically once we entered the flat farmlands of southern Illinois. The state is one of the top producers of wind energy in the US and the turbines are stretched for hundreds of miles across the horizon. The largest wind farm I read about covers 22,000 acres. This clean energy makes my heart very happy!

 

We stopped to enjoy lunch at a picnic table along the Interstate where we also enjoyed the local entertainment -- two Canada geese taking their brood of 6 little fluff balls out for their first foray into the water. (Those are the dots in the water along the far bank.) The parents demonstrated diving and the babies dove, popping up out of the water like corks. The parent took off into the air, circled once around, and when the babies didn't follow, returned to the lake.

We spent the second night on the road at my sister and BIL's home in Wisconsin. The Writer and BIL spent some time touring the garden and the chicken palace (no chicks until June). Rhubarb, asparagus, and raspberries are doing well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last stop, lunch in Minnesota along the Mississippi River. Another beautiful spot but ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...why is it a rest stop if visitors are so unwelcome???

So much to do to get the house ready in a week, sell my car, and all the other details of ending a life somewhere you have spent the last 30 years. But today is MOTHER'S DAY and I am blogging from my favorite Minnesota coffee shop, right next to the fireplace as it was 39 degrees this morning! In a while we will go to my daughter's to see all my favorite people in the world, especially four little boys I haven't see for months.

Meanwhile, Happy Mother's Day

to all the mums and grammas!

I won't be able to visit all my favorite bloggers regularly for awhile because I don't have wifi at the house, but I'll catch up when I can.

 

 

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Monday Morning Bike Ride

It was just the start of an ordinary Monday.

We live on a small island, Knowles Island. There is one road on and off the island over a causeway between ours and the next island, DeLoss Island. There is one more causeway from Deloss to the mainland and a state hIghway. Although the island roads are narrow and curvy there are hardly any cars and we enjoy riding our bikes to look for birds and wildlife and soak up the views.

 

Right now the wildflowers along the causeways are spectacular.

The red flowers are red clover but I haven't been able to identify the others.

 

 

On our Monday bike ride, we left the pavement and rode along a logging road as far as we could, then got off and walked to the end of the trail.

 

Besides the downed logs, the road is made of sand under the leaves and it got very hard to pedal.

 

I'm still puzzling over the "litterbug" who dropped all these oyster shells in the woods. They are from a bird that perched high above in the tree to eat them.

It looks like he has been dining in this spot for quite some time.

Maybe an osprey? An eagle?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We pedaled back across the causeway at low tide,

 

 

...back past the site of one of the plantation homes of Roseland Plantation. All that is left there is a grove of live oaks hung with Spanish moss that shaded its big verandas 175 years ago.

 

 

 

 

The Writer returned to his desk, I began the laundry, a wonderful start to our day.

" I've made a promise to myself not to wait until a life-threatening or life-limiting disorder strikes to begin to treasure all of my days. Each day - regular, unremarkable days as well as the days marking memorable occasions -- is a gift. It is a chance to look around and see the world in a new way. It is a chance to accept what is and embrace whatever life brings with joy -- living with gratitude instead of self-pity, wonder instead of fear. Each day is, indeed, worth celebrating."

--From a blog I enjoy:

http://drkathleenmccoy.blogspot.com/2014/09/daily-gratitude.html

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Two Cemeteries

 

Beneath this grassy field lie the tired bones of those who came to America on slave ships, were sold in the Charleston and Savannah slave markets and purchased to work the rice fields of the Lowcountry by white planters like the Huguenins of Roseland Plantation. The Huguenins owned 329 slaves who worked the 25,000 acres of Roseland Plantation rice and cotton fields.

The island we live on is surrounded by that plantation land.

The slave cemetery on Roseland Road is a beautiful resting place for those hardest working of slaves, those who built and labored in the disease and mosquito-ridden rice fields.

No one knows how many men, women, and children are buried here, who they were, how they died. If the graves of slaves were marked at all, it was with a pile of shells, a small bouquet of wildflowers, a wooden cross long ago turned to dust.

There are a few old marked graves, of slaves who died after the Civil War and Emancipation.

 

"Our Beloved Pastor, Rev. P. Smalls

Born Sept. 1, 1807, Died July 21, 1887"

 

 

 

 

Surrounding the field of unmarked graves are the modern graves of the descendants of the slaves who still live up and down Roseland Road.

One of the newest graves is that of a little boy, 8 years old, who was shot to death in the crossfire of bullets fired by three men who had been arguing all afternoon.

Khalil and the son of one of the men had been playing outside his grandmother's home when he was shot.

The men were between 19 and 37 years old and amongst the three, had previously been arrested in Beaufort County a total of 74 times!

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The remains of the plantation owners, the Huguenin family, lie under giant oaks a few miles away,

in a cemetery near where one of three plantation houses stood.

In this brick tomb are the bodies of three little Huguenin brothers -- Thomas, Theodore, and Lawrence -- who lived only 16 months, two years, and one day.

Though the planters made fantastic sums of money, it was not an easy life or one without tragedy and grief.

I wonder if their wives would say it was worth it.

 

 

 

 

Outside the brick walls at the back are the unmarked graves of the house slaves -- the cooks, personal servants, the nannies, laundresses, midwives, seamstresses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Writer thinks I'm a bit obsessed with slaves and slavery and all that. But I think it's that I am fascinated with a way of life, a history, a culture that as a northerner I knew very little about. Sometimes I feel like I am living in a foreign country, or on another planet! Anyway, I hope I haven't bored you.

 

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El Galeon and Updating History

On a quiet afternoon this weekend, it was easy to imagine the waves erasing the years, to imagine that we were experiencing the vision Native Americans saw 450 years ago when a Spanish tall ship rounded the tip of Parris Island and came into view off Port Royal, South Carolina.

More than 40 years before the English settled at Jamestown in Virginia, the Spanish built a town and fort on an island in Port Royal Sound.

Jamestown has long claimed the title of First European Settlement, but recent archeological work on the 9th hole of the Parris Island golf course proves a different story.

The Spanish established a permanent settlement in 1566, Santa Elena, on that very spot on the island you see in the background of the photo.

Santa Elena served as the Spanish capital of Florida from 1569 to 1587. The area then called Florida encompassed most of what is known as the United States today.

As we watched, a Coast Guard tender and several yachts escorted El Galeon, a 125 foot tall, 500 ton replica of a 16th century Spanish ship, into the harbor, to the Port Royal Dock.

 

 

 

Along with those of us gathered on the beach, kayakers watched from the water.

 

The ship left St. Augustine, Florida, the day before, following the historic journey of Pedro Menendez de Aviles when he sailed into Port Royal Sound on the same day in 1566.

 

This week the 450th anniversary of the settlement at Santa Elena is being celebrated with lots of events, including the opening of the new Santa Elena museum in Beaufort and the arrival of El Galeon in Port Royal.

It is docked among the shrimp boats and will be open for tours over the next week.

If only they had had the sails up!

 

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Earth Day 2016

 

 

Because of children like these ...

Places like this ...

And facts like these ...

The average American generates 4.3 pounds of waste per day, 1.6 pounds more than in 1960.

It takes about a thousand years for plastic bottles to break down naturally. (That's an educated guess. No one has ever seen one break down completely yet.

The U.S. buried or burned more than 166 million tons of recyclable resources – paper, plastic, metals, glass and organic materials – in landfills and incinerators last year.

The average American discards 65 lbs of clothing a year. Five years ago, clothing represented 7% of the trash in landfills; today, 30%.

46,000 pieces of plastic trash are present on every square mile of the ocean today.

Virtually every piece of plastic ever created still exists on the Earth today.

Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone.

More than 2 million people globally die prematurely every year due to outdoor and indoor air pollution.

Every year in the U.S. nearly 200 billion recyclable beverage containers are sold, two-thirds of which are landfilled, incinerated or littered.

 

I will ...

 

Earth Day

2016

 

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