Pocket Park with a View
As we were winding our way home from lunch, we came across a tiny parking area – two cars worth – and a pocket park with a view to die for.
The park is about where it says Chipley Avenue, and has a view of the Garcon Point bridge; a perfect place to watch the sun rise, if you are a sunrise person, which . . .I am!
The park was donated by a gift from a woman who is memorialized in a tiny plaque in the park:
Isn’t that a beautiful legacy to leave behind when you depart this world?
The Mediterranean Plus In Pensacola
Woooo HOOOOOO on YOU, AdventureMan, you were RIGHT! (He always looks for his name, so might as well put it right up front for him 😉 )
We had visited an international grocery store to look for some particular spices, and AdventureMan spotted the Mediterranean Plus just around the corner. We thought they might be related . . . both have felafel and other “Mediterranean” specialties we have come to associate with the Middle East – hummus, tabouli, baba ghannoush, fattoush . . .
As we walked in, we knew we had come to the right place:
The menu was to die for – almost all the things we love. The owner is Jordanian, and, while there is no fattah for my early breakfast 🙂 he has a lot of other wonderful dishes to satisfy our ‘Mediterranean’ cravings. Once again, I apologize. Sometimes when the food shows up, I forget about photos until it is too late. I wish you could have seen this plate when it was prepared, it was beautiful. Even better, the baba ghannoush is lush and smokey, as good as any I have ever had in Kuwait and Qatar. The tabouli was just exactly right, the right blend of parsley and bulgar, exactly the right amount of lemon. Mumtaz.
I have been on a mission. I have a good friend who is down to the last of some Kuwait biriyani spices I had brought back as a guest gift a while back, and I was hoping to find more. I found biriyani spice AND I found Lebanese olive oil. I laughed when I saw Vimto:
As AdventureMan talked with the owner, he discovered we actually had been in the restaurant before, in its previous location on Cervantes. This location has a lot more space for diners and for parking. We are thrilled to find it – the food is GOOD!
Mediterranean Plus
6895 N 9th Ave
Pensacola
850 469 9225
One Moment in Time
I would have told you if I had known about it long enough in advance. The New York Times had a photo . . . not contest . . . opportunity. They asked people all around the world to shoot a photo at 1500 Greenwich Mean Time, which is 1000 Pensacola time.
As we were leaving for the Episcopal Lite service (0800; it is amazing, they do a processional, recessional, sermon, prayers of the people and communion in 45 minutes flat, amazing!) and I told AdventureMan I needed to take a photo.
It is what I love about AdventureMan. No matter what I propose, he is up for it. OK, sometimes I get a little foot dragging, but for the most part, he is Gung Ho. We hit church, we even had time for a little breakfast at the Shiny Diner, and then we went to take photos. This is what the New York Times instructions were:
Where will you be on Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 hours (U.T.C.)?
Wherever you are, we hope you’ll have a camera — or a camera phone — in hand. And we hope you’ll be taking a picture to send to Lens that will capture this singular instant in whatever way you think would add to a marvelous global mosaic; a Web-built image of one moment in time across the world.
Please keep your photos under 5MB in size.
I didn’t read the instructions. I sent them three photos. I was only supposed to send one.
AdventureMan is going down tomorrow to volunteer with the Fish and Wildlife service; they are going to need a lot of volunteers when the oil slick hits, Tuesday or Wednesday. It is going to be a horror.
A Normal, Wonderful Day
Yesterday, Friday, AdventureMan and I had our first “normal” day in Pensacola, a day where we are living in our normal house doing very normal things. Normally, I find normal kind of boring, but after the last month, I find normal very comforting. I was beginning to wonder if life would ever be normal again, and what normal would look like.
Here is what normal looked like: We got up and went to our water aerobics class, which was really HARD (hard is good; we want to be living healthier lives, it was hard in the way that it was challenging, not hard in the way that is discouraging.) On our way home we saw a coffee shop we had heard about, and on an impulse, we decided to have breakfast on the way home.
I had an egg sandwich on a biscuit, and AdventureMan had biscuits and gravy. We were in and out in about 20 minutes, eating food that was probably not good for us, but it gave us all the energy we needed for what came next.
We cleaned house.
That may not sound like a fun normal day to you, and no, we don’t get a lot of joy out of cleaning house, but when you have lived in a chaos of boxes, and everything is put away, but it is all messy and disorderly still, you can see how dirty the floors have gotten. AdventureMan took the upstairs vacuum and he READ THE MANUAL (I know, I know, I am still in shock) and he vacuumed upstairs AND mopped the bathroom floors. (!) (!) (!)
I finished getting most things put away downstairs and then vacuumed and mopped all the tile and wood floors, and holy smokes, that is hard work. And when you finish, it feels so good!
AdventureMan worked in his office. I read the newspaper.
Our son and grandson came by for a few minutes to drop off some tickets to the Chocolate Fest Benefit for the Gulf Coast Kids House, a local facility that helps kids who have been abused, investigating and prosecuting offenders and helping provide children with a safe place to tell their experience. We got to see Baby Q grin at us. It’s for these moments that we moved here; we don’t need to be living in their pockets, but a few minutes now and then is heaven.
Then we headed off for Date Night. We went to dinner and a movie – a Swedish movie called The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo which was playing in Gulf Breeze. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is based on a book by Stieg Larsson, and is a very unusual mystery book with deeply flawed characters. I’ve now read the follow-up, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and I am hooked. There is only one more, and I am waiting for it to come out in paperback.
The movie was exceptional. Although it was in color, because so much of it was Sweden in winter, it seemed very black and white, very documentary. Even when spring came, the colors were muted. Somehow it made it more real, more gritty. The movie was very true to the book. There were things left out, but not things that impacted greatly on the sense of the movie. All in all, it was a very satisfying, if disturbing, movie, which leaves you itching for a follow-up. Isn’t that the sign of a good movie?
We stopped for dinner at Billy Bob’s BBQ, and I will write that up next.
That’s it. That’s our wonderfully normal day. It may not sound like much to you, but for a normal day, it wasn’t bad, in fact, it was a pretty good day.
We’ve had two weekends of stormy winds and heavy rains. My rosebushes were sparse, and all of a sudden, there are buds – and petals – everywhere!
And here, just for you, is a view of the sunset through the heavy thunderclouds over Pensacola on a Friday night:
Tax Day Tea Party in Pensacola
We don’t really understand the Tea Party. It is clearly against Obama, but then again, it is clearly the party of “against” and it is hard to find anything it is for. This is a problem; it is easy to tear down, and it is a lot more difficult to create – to formulate solutions which will provide benefits for the majority of participants.
As we were approaching our hotel, we saw this huge crowd of ‘protesters’ who appeared to be partying. But every sign was different! As 15 April is Tax Day, the day our income taxes are due, maybe about 10% were carrying signs that had to do with taxes, preferably NO taxes. The rest of the signs protested other things – constitutional amendments (what – women voting? black people being counted as full people? the repeal of prohibition?), no abortion, putting God first – it was a total potluck of causes.
The weather was mild, the sun was shining, there was a breeze – great day for an incoherent protest, LOL. I took pictures from the safety of our car, although everyone seemed very friendly:
Here is what cracks us up. Pensacola is a highly military reliant community. There is a huge military presence here, from Eglin Air Force Base to the Pensacola Naval Air Station. Pensacola is glad to have the military business. So where do they think the money comes from that pays the military salaries, and thus, gets spent in their economy, at their businesses? Few Americans have saved enough to comfortably retire, who do they think is contributing to their Social Security support, and Medicare, and Medigap? Tax dollars! Who do they think supports public education, and guarantees law and order? Who do they think runs the justice system? Who do they think provides emergency fire and medical services? Tax dollars! Who builds and maintains the roads and bridges, insures safety in our food supplies, construction and medicines? Our government, supported by our tax dollars!
Do I like paying taxes? No! Not one bit! But in the interest of the greater good, we pay our taxes honestly, and thank God to live in a society with order, thanks to our tax dollars.
AdventureMan Finds the Sunset
It was getting close to five p.m. and AdventureMan had just awakened from a much shorter nap than usual. There is no pressure to adjust to the local time, so he is taking it slow. I love to watch him take a nap.
“So what do you want to do?” he asks me, and suppresses a groan when I remind him he said we would find some places where I can watch the sun set.
We decided to head over to Perdido Bay, me navigating, but sometimes I miss the right turn and we have an “adventure.” It’s all OK, it’s not like we have to be anywhere by any time, so there’s no such thing as a wrong turn, just another opportunity to make some additional connections in the brain cells as we try to figure out Pensacola. Or that’s the way I am telling it, and it is my blog. Anyone can make a mistake, right?
Pensacola has very funny roads. Almost all the roads curve. Like the road we live on is the same road my son lives on, but where he lives, the road is north south, but where we live, it is almost east-west. A road called 9th, you would think would be a straight road, but it is more like a parabola! Fairchild road will turn south and become Navy Boulevard, but the real Fairchild road actually continues, considerably diminished. You just have to get used to it; it doesn’t have to make sense.
And there are Kuwaiti drivers everywhere!
(So, OK, now it comes. I apologize for all the bad things I ever said about Kuwait drivers. American drivers are also going through the orangey-red lights, even going through the red lights, and American drivers are also making left turns from the far right turn lanes. Yep. I’ve seen it. Guess I’ve been gone a long time. I wonder if even Seattle has become the Wild West on the roads? The difference between the really bad American drivers and the Kuwait drivers is that the Americans are mostly driving a lot slower when they do these things. So Kuwait, I apologize.)
We discover there is no state park along the band of land from where we thought we were going to watch the sunset, and there sure are a lot of slabs where houses used to be – which usually means they were blown away or seriously destroyed in one hurricane or another.
AdventureMan found a fabulous place, though, Tarkiln Bayou Preserve State Park. They have two walking trails, and since it was getting close to sunset (and I have a thing about being in swampy areas after dark) we chose to do the short hike, like one mile, out to the Bayou, but next time we will do the 7.2 mile hike out to the Bay.
We didn’t know we were going to do the hike when we left the car, so I didn’t have my camera. At first, we were walking not too far from the busy highway and thought it wasn’t such a great hike, but then AdventureMan spied the endangered white pitcher plant, a carnivorous plant that traps insects. Pretty fantastic!
This was one fantastic adventure. I am going to show you some pictures I got from the Florida State Parks website, focusing on Tarkiln Bayou.
This is a view of where the trail ended – it was unbelievably beautiful. The sun was setting and we were on a bayou with not another human being in sight, not a house, not a trail – it was pure nature surrounding this gorgeous tiny little bayou. But . . . the sun was setting, and I don’t like to be out in a park after dark. No, I am not chicken, I am a realist, foolish people who are where they should not be can find themselves in big trouble when the sun goes down. Also, I hate mosquitos and mosquito bites, and they usually come out around sundown, so we did our return hike at a healthy pace.
As we headed home, AdventureMan said “I think I remember a good place where you can see the sunset.”
And within five minutes, we were there.
You know how I love those sunrises in Kuwait. Sunsets are what I love even more. Here are some photos of last night’s sunset, thanks to AdventureMan 🙂
And so I ask you – is this not a magnificent way to end a day?
The ’50’s Automatic Car Wash
Not too far from where we will live is this old fashioned car-wash, with all these car washing machines.
It costs $5.00. That is it. No additional taxes, it is all included. You can get the fancier treatments, but I just needed to get the pollen and sap off my new car. Within seconds, I was in, and finished.
It could make you a little claustrophobic (well, it makes me just a little claustrophobic) because you have NO control! You have to keep your hand off the steering wheel and your foot off the brake! You just sit there while water shoots from different directions, and then you are covered with soap suds and you cannot see a thing except the lights from the car in front of you, oh no!
And then huge gusts of wind and it is over except for the optional – and free – vacuums you can use to clean out the car interior.
My car looked like new! I think me and the 50’s car wash are going to be good friends.
It does remind me of the automatic car wash we used to visit in Saudi Arabia. In a country where labor is cheap and the harshness of the weather and climate makes specialized machinery hard to maintain, things happen. We don’t know if the machines broke and couldn’t be fixed or whether they were sabotaged, but while it was billed as an “automatic” car wash, it was this thing where the car got on tracks but while water squirted and suds squirted, there were people, not brushes, with rags and towels, washing, drying, spraying, scrubbing and finally buffing. The end result was the same, but people, not machines, did the work.
Pensacola/Escambia County Honors WWII Vets
To understand how significant this is, you need to know that Pensacola is not a wealthy area, suffering more than 10% unemployment. Pensacola and Escambia County were hit hard by Hurricanes Ivan and Dennis, and are still recovering, but when asked to support this effort, exceeded – and nearly doubled – the charitable contribution:
The sixth trip of Emerald Coast Honor Flight is scheduled to depart from the Pensacola Gulf Coast Regional Airport this morning, taking a group of Northwest Florida’s WWII veterans to see the WWII Memorial.
This is from the Pensacola News Journal for today:
The Escambia County School District is the major sponsor for the April 14 flight, which will take 98 World War II veterans to Washington, D.C.
More than $114,000 was raised through individual donations. Teachers made personal donations to sponsor a veteran, often doing so in honor of their own loved ones who served during WWII. Students saved pennies and participated in school activities such as the “Hats Off To Veterans” day hosted at N. B. Cook.
All of the funds given were donations made by employees, students, schools, parents and community members.
In October, the district set a goal to sponsor 50 veterans, but within six weeks, the goal had been exceeded. On March 16, Superintendent Malcolm Thomas presented a ceremonial check to Emerald Coast Honor Flight, representing the largest donation ever made to the organization.
“I’m so incredibly proud of Escambia County’s staff, teachers and students,” Thomas said in a news release. “They really stepped up to the challenge to honor our local veterans by sending them on Honor Flight.”
The veterans, whose ages range from 82 to 95, will have guardians to escort them throughout the entire day. A cherished war time memory , “mail call,” will be re-created on the flight to Washington, with letters of appreciation from students and employees being distributed to each of the veterans.
Bryce Cox, a fourth-grade student from N. B. Cook Elementary, wrote one of the letters.
“I wrote ‘Thank you for serving our country and protecting it and I hope you have fun on the Honor Flight,” Bryce said.
A big homecoming celebration is planned upon the veterans’ return to Pensacola. Escambia County School District high school bands, cheerleaders and NJROTCs will be participating.
The public is invited to welcome home the veterans as at 7 p.m. at the Pensacola Gulf Coast Regional Airport.
Wooo HOOOO on you, Pensacola and Escambia County!
Golden Age at Fort Pickens
“We need a break” said AdventureMan, and we decided to go exploring, preferably out in some beachy area. We decided to visit Ft. Pickens, waaaaaaaaay out on the end of a very long barrier island protecting Pensacola.
You can see the blue balloon shows where the Fort Pickens defenses were built:
It’s a national park. It costs $6 to drive a car in.
“Are there any annual passes?” AdventureMan asked, because for us, those are a good deal, and once you buy them you can go anywhere!
The answer was yes, but it was expensive, probably still worth it, but the twinkly eyed woman then asked him “Are you a golden ager?”
“What?” AdventueMan asked in confusion.
“Are you 62? If you are 62, you can buy a Golden Age pass that lets you in all the National Parks for $10.”
“No,” AdventureMan stuttered, “no, not yet . . . ”
“But I am!” I hollered, handing him the money to buy a Golden Age pass before she could change her mind. She carded me, yes, she did, but as I am four months older than AdventureMan, I qualified, and now we can go anywhere (as long as he is with me, we get in on my pass.)
Fort Pickens is beautiful. The sand is white and powdery, and the sea is a lot like the Arabian Gulf, all shades of green and turquoise and blues, shading into purples.
Looks like snow, doesn’t it?
AdventureMan loves old forts; here are where gun batteries were once placed to guard the shores:
We spotted Osprey flying on the air currents around the forts, and huge osprey nests:
We hiked along a beautiful bike/walking trail where I saw tiny purple flowers like we used to find in Saudi Arabia:
Sharp eyed AdventureMan pointed out a snapping turtle – can you see him?
Can you see him now?
We needed a day to remind us it’s not all about work. Getting settled as we get retired – isn’t that supposed to be fun?
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Early Voting in Florida
