Vacation to Tallahassee

I spent last week in warm and sunny Tallahassee, Florida. Lyn and I left on Friday, March 6 and got back on Friday, the 13th - The Ides of March. We stayed at the retirement community where my parents live, in one of the rooms that can be reserved for out-of-town visitors. My 2 sisters were there, too. Ann came on Saturday with her daughter's dog to give to my parents. She changed her travel plans at the last minute to avoid bringing the dog on the plane and drove down with a seminary student from France and his wife from Brazil. Their plans went a bit haywire and they ended up staying in the vicinity through the week. They were a delightful couple. Nancy arrived on Tuesday. We saw family friends, sorted pictures, I got to finish my father's socks so my Christmas presents are done, and my sisters worked on my parents' computers and taught them how to use Quicken. Lyn got to sort through my mother's collections of New Yorker cartoons and put them in categories of interest so my mother could make birthday cards for family members. Lyn reports that the New Yorker tends to favor penguins as cartoon subjects more than anything else.

I lived in Tallahassee from the time I was 2 years old until I was 12 or 13. My father was the pastor of First Presbyterian and we lived in the manse that the church provided our family. Every year I go back to Tallahassee, I make a pilgrimage to see the Terrace Street manse, and this year I took pictures. I read somewhere that ones true home is the home that recurs in dreams. This is the house that I always associate with home and it's been my favorite house. I had the room on the far left of the house, over the screen porch.

The front view:



Lyn got to go to St. George Island with Maria and Tomas (seminary student and wife). St. George is another "sacred" place in my early memories. We would go to St. George every August for a month. At the time we went there were few houses on the island. We had a cinder block house that my parents bought and we had to get to the island by taking a ferry. When we needed food we'd take a motor boat to the mainland and drive to Apalachicola in a car that we had parked in the ferry parking lot. There were wild pigs, dolphins, sharks, tons of shells, big sand dunes, birds, crabs, and even sea turtles that would come and lay eggs. There was a park ranger that lived on the island who took us to see them once. St. George is now home to several million dollar homes and there is a bridge to get there. There's also a state park that resembles the island when I went there as a child. This is where Lyn went and took pictures of sea gulls and the face sculptures that Tomas made in the sand.







Tallahassee's prettiest time of year is in the spring. I always like to go in March or April. This year I got azaleas, though I missed the tea olive - the blossom smell I always associate with Tallahassee. These pictures were taken where my parents live.

A red bud tree:



Azaleas:





Dogwoods just beginning to bloom:



Vacation ended too soon. I didn't want to come back to the gray blanket of Portland, but I missed Ardella and couldn't stay longer. Plus, we are employed and had to come back to work. Sigh!