Our Anniversary Trip

Back in June, Jimmy and I celebrated 25 years of marriage.  This week we continued our celebration with a short trip to one of my favorite destinations--Seaside, Florida. We left early Monday morning and came home yesterday afternoon.  We left the children here at home....but we felt badly about doing so.  They assured us they were fine with us going on a little vacation without us.  All was well when we arrived home!

So what did we do??  Well, if you know us, you know that even on our "vacations" we are active!  Our tiny rental house (and it certainly was a tiny one bedroom cottage!) came with two bicycle rentals. After we parked our car upon our arrival, we never used it again until we loaded up to come home.  We rode those bicycles everywhere!  One of them had a basket on the front so we could carry our groceries home each day. We rode to the grocery store, we rode around the towns of Seaside and Watercolor, we rode on biking/running trails, and we even rode on one very, very difficult (and unoccupied--that should have been our clue) nature trail.  We logged many miles on those bikes!

Here we are bright and early the first morning--about to go on our bike ride.

In addition to biking every day, we also ran every day.  It was hot, but we tried to run either early in the morning or near sundown. 

After some biking and running each morning, we were ready to relax with books on the beach. The water was beautiful!  As clear as we have ever seen it at Seaside.

I read three books while sitting on the beach or back in our tiny house. (Giddy Up, Eunice by Sophie Hudson--excellent!, Glitter and Glue by Kelly Corrigan--it was okay....it held my attention, but I would not recommend it, and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho--interesting....an allegory of sorts...not earth shattering, but an interesting read.  I was disappointed in the ending. I began a 4th book, but after reading the first few chapters and then skimming through the rest of it, I knew that I did not want to finish it. (The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion) (Some books are like that.  I think it's okay not to finish a book!) So I began a 5th book, and I hope to finish it here at home.  (Gilead  by  Marilynn Robinson) We will see. I am back to reality--which does not allow much time for reading for pleasure.  Gilead was recommended to me by one of the employees of Sundog Books, my favorite bookstore of all.  It's located in Seaside, and I love to look around there when we visit. On some of the shelves in the bookstore there are groups of books that are the favorites of each of the employees. I took a picture of another girl's shelf.  I could tell by the books on her shelf that I have read and enjoyed that I would like her other recommendations too.  What a neat idea!

 Here we are about to walk to town for supper.

This picture was taken on the crazy hot trail ride we did!  

All in all it was a super fun trip!  Jimmy and I enjoyed each other's company so much, and I came home very rested.