summertime

well it looks like there is really going to be a serious delay between posts here during this summer. for some reason i have been bombarded with work, when usually the summer is my slow season. not that i'm complaining. ok, i am, but i'm trying to just focus on the good parts, such as steady paychecks and the tentative plan to buy a new couch with some of the funds that will be flooding in soon.

for those of you not friends with me on FB, i wanted to share some of the photos i took while we were away at flagler beach, FL, last week.

i was very hesitant to go to the "east coast" at all for vacation. in fact, at first i told rick, um, no thanks, i am NOT going where there are waves and the ocean isn't perfectly blue. oh my. how spoiled am i? pretty much. side note: if you haven't visited us, you really need to, because there is so much amazing white sand and blue water here, about 5 miles from our house maybe? maybe 10. anyway, it's very close.

as we approached the condo where we would be relaxing and recovering from reality for the week, we found ourselves on this long, winding road with a canopy of palm trees, sawgrass, and palmettos surrounded by swamp. beautiful swamp. this is the "real" florida, rick's parents like to call it. apparently when they were our age (they are 80 and 86 now) a good deal of florida actually looked like wilderness--untouched by development, overgrown, mosquito-infested (ok, we will just stop before we imagine all the not-so-nice parts).

it really was breathtaking. so some of these pictures are my attempt to sort of recapture what the drive in looked like. but if you have taken any pictures ever in your life you know that when it comes to overwhelming beauty in nature it's pretty impossible to capture the sense you get from standing IN it, in real life. at least for us amateur photographers.

the planes are in a graveyard of sorts on a highway between st. augustine and our condo in flagler beach. we drove by and immediately turned around to go over and take some pictures. when i looked the place up online, it seems to have attracted all sorts of photojournalists, some of whom have sneaked over the fence and taken pictures from inside the aircraft. i would have LOVED to have done that. but i also didn't want to get shot at, and this neighborhood looked like the sort of place where that might be a possibility.

some of the skies in these pictures are untouched. i did nothing to them. just loaded them onto the computer. pretty crazy. i couldn't believe even after looking at them loaded on here just how beautiful they are.

every time i go back and look at them i feel a little joyful, so i hope they brighten your day too.

(if anyone knows what kind of tree this is will you leave a comment?)