Here There and Everywhere

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?

April 15, 2010 Posted by intlxpatr | Adventure, Cross Cultural, Entertainment, Exercise, ExPat Life, Kuwait, Living Conditions, Sunsets | Sunsets | 5 Comments