Mama's Home With Photos!

I'm home again after another trip to MA. I had posted on facebook that I was making a sad trip to be with my family while my aunt was dying.

I've written about it before. She is 10 years younger than my Mom and 12 years older than I am, so it was always like I had a big sister/aunt. She spent the last 2 years suffering from the effects of many years of diabetes and complications. I got a phone call on a Friday morning and arrived in MA that night, as she was going into a coma. When I gave her a kiss and told her I was there, she gave me a definate sign that she heard me. We spent the next 36 hours talking to her and holding her hand. I couldn't let go until her fingers turned blue and the funeral director came into the room.

 

May 1968

I spent some time with this guy...

I came home with this in my carry-on. You can only get it in that neck of the woods.

I ate way too much of this...

Fried fish, fried shrimp, fried potatoes, fried clam cakes(fritters), Clam chowder, stuffed clams.
I nearly fried myself into a gall bladder attack.

I came home to find that Mr Sunshine and Sorority Girl had replaced the 52-inch portal to sports and movies with this new toy...

...and Little Miss Lily had loved her puppy to death...

Anybody want to hear the story about the Private Bad-ass Funeral I threw for my aunt?

 

Road Trip To Ybor City

Sunday, we headed to Tampa to have dinner with Cape Cod friends who were there for a week. We had planned to meet them around 5:00, so we got into town early to go to Ybor (pronounced EEBOR) City.

Ybor City is the Latin Quarter of Tampa.

In 1886, Ybor City was established as the center of cigar production in the United States.

There is a small State park with a museum...

...which was once an Italian Bakery...

...a small courtyard where people can sit at tables and play dominoes.

You can rent the courtyard for small weddings.
One of the casitas was open to the public.

Surprisingly, it was a comfortable, 2 bedroom house that was affordable enough, at $400, to be bought by a worker with small deductions from his paycheck.

The art on the cigar boxes is really beautiful.

We walked 2 blocks over to the entertainment district of town.

We ended the night with a great dinner in Clearwater and a beautiful sunset on Clearwater Beach.

Last Of The Savannah Photos

Fifth in a series of What I Did On My Summer Vacation...I promise!

Last time I showed you Mr Sunshine's Savannah photos. These are mine.

He likes to photograph interesting houses and buildings. He gets the big picture. I like to step in close and focus on one thing. I also like to shoot in black and white.

River Street

River Street

Aboard The Danmark

Fancy Downspout

A lot of the buildings in the Historic District of Savannah have beautiful ironwork details. You can read about it here.



Mr Sunshine Photographs Savannah

We took over 100 photos in an afternoon of roaming the neighborhoods in Savannah. Here are the ones I think are his best. Next time I'll show you mine!

In memory of the Haitian Soldiers that fought for us in the Revolutionary War.

James Oglethorpe-founder of the colony of Georgia

Sgt William Jasper died a Revolutionary war hero at age 29

 

History Nerd Goes To Savannah

Third in a series of "What We Did On Our Summer Vacation"

We spent 3 and 1/2 days in Savannah. If we visit a city that has some history and a Trolley tour, we go on the tour and decide what areas of town we want to further explore.

I'll say that I have mixed feelings about the city. If you are a clean freak you would be a little uncomfortable. It's a gritty city for sure,many areas with dirty pavement, trash,the smell of horse poop wherever the carriages stop, a lot of unemployed hanging around a couple of the squares and we didn't feel particularly safe walking around after dark.

What I did love is that it is a funky city with a lot of character. It's crawling with art students from SCAD and the college is responsible for a large amount of the historic preservation and refurbishing of the old buildings. Nearly every building has a story, especially along the waterfront there are old cotton factories turned into shops and restaurants and there are streets full of interesting architecture (my next post is photos we took on a walk of the neighborhoods).

HUGE cargo ships pass by the waterfront every day. While we were there the Danish training ship DANMARK was in port. We toured the ship and talked to the young people who were spending a semester at sea. It was a "sea" of beautiful blonde-blue-eyed, friendly students who told us all about their days and nights on the ship and where they had travelled.

We have a little sailing experience from living on Cape Cod and it was Mr Sunshine who noticed that there are no mechanical aids on this ship to help raise the sails. The students have to pull the lines by hand and climb up the mast to furl and unfurl the sails. Some of the students admitted to being a little afraid of heights!

 Our hotel was near City Market and Ellis Square (there are currently 22 squares in Savannah). There is this statue of Johnny Mercer that we passed at least once a day. Did you know he wrote the lyrics to 1500 songs and won 4 Academy Awards? I found myself humming some of my favorites every time I passed...Moon River,You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby, Days Of Wine And Roses. Jeepers Creepers (where'd ya get those peepers) and Come Rain Or Come Shine.

 I wanted to see the inside of the Cathedral Of St John The Baptist. Before the American Revolution it was forbidden to be Catholic in Georgia. It was thought that Catholics would be more loyal to the Spanish instead of the British.  Shortly after the war was over this church was built by immigrants from France and Haiti.

 I immediately thought that the church reminded me of the one I went to as a child in MA. It was also founded by French Catholic immigrants to the US.

 We found St Patrick in one of the stained glass windows.

 The bottom of the baptismal font is beautiful.

The city is home to Savannah College of Art And Design, founded in 1978. The students appear to travel about the neighborhoods in large groups. I loved the outfits, makeup, HUGE portfolios cases they were carrying and they seemed to be a happy bunch. Unfortunately I couldn't afford anything in the student/alumni store!

 Poor Florence. Her beloved left to go to sea and asked her to wait for him. She spent the next 40 years greeting every ship that came up the river. He never returned and the story goes that she died of a broken heart.

Sorry, Mr Sunshine. I think I might have moved on with my life.

Detour to Amelia Island

Mr Sunshine and I are a decade or so from retirement age (wow). We know it definately won't be in Orlando. This is a temporary home until Sorority Girl gets settled in her life.

We have very few requirements for our final home. It needs to be near the water and it needs to be a laid-back kind of place. We loved  Key West last year, even though it is so far away from the rest of the US you might as well live in Cuba. This year I thought we could check out Amelia Island FL on our way to Savannah. It's a tiny little island about 20 minutes from Jacksonville.

Amelia  had just about everything we love...a local/non-touristy feel, gorgeous beach, a decent golf course, a good shopping area with the big stores you occasionally need and a funky little downtown with cool shops and restaurants.

I didn't take too many photos on Amelia because my butt spent a fair amount of time on a barstool here...

Nothing between my barstool and the ocean at Slider's Tiki Bar. We chatted with the bartenders and locals, enjoyed people watching, watched some football and ate awesome grilled scallops. Mr Sunshine convinced me to sling back a few shots...something I've never done before and boy, Washington Apple Shots are yummy! Luckily our hotel was a short walk across the street.

The second morning we planned to go to the beach, but we woke up thinking the whole island was on fire. We couldn't even see the beach from our hotel. The front desk guy told us that there was a fire west of Jacksonville. He also told us that it is not uncommon for Amelia to get the smoke from fires in FL and south GA.

We took a short walk on the beach to collect some shells and shark teeth. We started getting scratchy throats and I was afraid any more time outside would fling me into an asthma attack, so I spent the rest of the day hanging out in the hotel while Mr Sunshine played golf. Smoky air could possibly be a deal breaker for retiring to Amelia.

The next day we went on a tour boat that goes up along the coast of Cumberland Island GA. I was hoping to see some of the bands of wild horses that live on Cumberland and we weren't disappointed. They live in bands (families) and we saw two bands.

We also saw the area that was the birthplace of Shrimp fishing in the US and watched one of the boats unloading huge buckets of shrimp.

One of our favorite places was Cafe Karibo. They have a pretty shaded patio area and a small dining room attached to a small bar. They brew their own beer and the food was excellent. We ate lunch there one day and the next night we went back for dinner and stayed to play Trivia Night with the locals.

I may need to stockpile some inhalers and retire to Amelia Island after all!