Yes, I Know Winter is Over

It has been a long hard winter. I had shoulder surgery in late December and another artery reaming in March which has limited the amount of outdoor sort of things we do, like ice fishing, sledding, skating, and since spring has not been all that great weather wise so far we have not done much photography. But the old boomers are out at it again finally.

Last year at about this time I had a conference in Phoenix which Karen and I were able to stretch into a vacation to several great sites in Arizona. This year the same conference was in Florida, so we decided to do another mini vacation along with the conference.

We left Fort Wayne Thursday afternoon March 31 and spent the first night just beyond Knoxville TN. The next day we drove to Savannah GA with the intent to see some sites and to decide if we wanted to stop through on our way back when we had a little more time.

We did a quick walking tour of the older sections of town got to the water front (actually a river walk) and had a late lunch in a restaurant overlooking the river.

We drove on down the coast of Georgia and stayed in a small town called Brunswick, which we later discovered had no coffee. I know this is hard to believe, but we drove all over the little town looking for a coffee shop or a restaurant and found nothing, bummer.

The next morning we headed down the coast into Florida and out to an island call Amelia that was supposed to be a more or less old Florida resort town. We found the down town main street and there was a farmers market going on and most important of all one of the first booths had coffee.

Karen was excited about the coffee as well.

One of the vendors had hundreds of blooming flowers and shrubs. Something we has not seen for many months.

The flowers were just beautiful. This is just a small sample of what we saw.

The building above is the City Hall. Indiana City Halls don't have palm trees in front unless they are made of plastic. After spending an hour or so in the market we walked up an down the main street, found another coffee shop and had coffee and a bagel. See there is civilization in the south after all.

Later in the morning we decided to see some of the other sites in town. Karen had read about nature trails and beaches and possibly options to rent bicycles. We found a bike rental shop near the beach and not too far from the green way trail. We decided to head out on the trail first. It turned out to be a wide mowed grass trail with a couple of hard packed tire track. For the most part the trail passed through a wetland environment. There was a ditch/channel from which they had gotten the material to build the path way through the swamp. We saw birds and turtles and eventually Karen spotted this critter laying with its tail on on the edge of the bike trail. I would guess it was about 8' long stretched out.

We rode the beach going back!

After dropping off the bikes we headed up the island to a park that had an old Civil War vintage fort. We stopped at a board walk and looked out over the salt water marsh.

Most of the trees were covered with Spanish moss. We had seen quite a bit of this in Savannah as well.

The fort turned out to be in pretty good shape. We spent a couple of hours at the fort and as it happened this was the weekend (once a month) when re-en actors were in the fort. They added to the look and feel of the fort itself and were pretty good at providing some background information.

I turns out that the fort was commissioned in 1847 by congress along with several other forts along the east coast. I asked the question "what was going in the USA at that time that would have made the congress make this decision?" After all the Civil War was still several years in the future at that point. Well in 1847 folks in the US thought that the Europeans were way to aggressive and were likely to attack us and try to conquer us or at least get control of some territory. Ahhh, the Federal Government at work with our tax dollars protecting us from terrorists. So the Congress authorized the building of forts at each of the East Coast Ports. Naturally some ports were considered more strategic or important than others and the fort at Amelia Island was not really high on the list.

As a matter of fact by 1861 at the start of the Civil War the contractor that was building this fort for the Federal Government was perhaps only half done with construction. Note the color of the Brick at the bottom of the wall compared to the color at the top. Since this fort was in the South the Federal Government notified the contractor that they intend to stop construction and payment to them. The State government of Florida now thinking that their risk of attack from Europe was less likely that an attack from the Union Army decided to muster resources and finish the fort.

Here is Karen heading into the fort on a wooden bridge over the moat.

This Arched walk way lead from the main courtyard to the enlisted men's Latrine.

And here is the latrine. You don't get this kind of high quality reporting in just every Blog.

The fort is actually in pretty good shape except for normal wear and tear of 150 years of exposure to the weather, and because the fort was never actually attacked.

Here is a view out over the entrance to the harbor.

In the courtyard the buildings, barracks, hospital, dinning, blacksmith armory etc. were also finished by the confederates when the Union's contractor left. It turned out that the officers quarters were never complete and hardly started, because the officers liked to stay in town rather than out at the fort.

Some of the architectural details and technologies to gaining access to various part of the fort were interesting and well thought out.

Here is another example of a building started by the Federal Government and and finished by the South.

There were several 10 inch cannons on site and it was interesting to see the technology they had to aim and load the cannons. As you can see below the cannons are in pairs. The muzzles were pretty high in the air and I asked how in the midst of battle did they reload. Wow, was the answer to this one interesting. It turns out that the cannons are sitting in what would be consider an already loaded position. Once fired the cannon would recoil back on the rails behind and drop down enough to allow it to be reloaded. The cannons are not necessarily intended to be reloaded during an attack. Apparently the idea was that the channel into the port was rather narrow, so for several weeks in advance they would aim the cannons to hit very precise locations along the channel. The lookout would warn of an incoming ship (think sailing ship). When the ship passed a certain marker point they would fire the cannon and take the ship out. If for some reason they missed the first time they would make a slight adjustment in the adjacent cannon to account for wind or distance and fire again. There were about 10 pairs of cannons, so trying to sail into a harbor like this one was pretty fool hardy.

So here is the rest of the story. As you can see there is not a cannon on every gun emplacement.

I figured they sold the cannons for scrap after the war. But actually there never were any cannons at this fort. The ones there now are not real they are only replicas. About the time they were requisitioning the cannons and thinking about starting the officers quarters, along came a guy name Bob Lee. He told the governor of Florida, "look, the Union is not going to attack Florida for crying out loud. The war is up north. you get your boys out of the fort and head up to Pennsylvania where we really need you help". so the Fort Construction was halted once again and it sat inactive until the Spanish American war when it was fitted with a newer retractable, adjustable cannon behind a new poured concrete wall. They found out by that time that brick forts don't stand up to cannon fire very well. Apparently the northern Civil War forts took quite a beating.

So this fort is nice to visit. The folks that try to maintain the fort and do the re-enactments have their hands full keeping the fort from falling apart. Forts are afterall sort of high maintenance and the original contractor is long gone the warrantee period has lapsed and the second contractor did not follow all of the original specifications anyway.

On this particular day there was a wedding scheduled for a couple that were part of the re-en-actor group. Here are a couple of the ushers who were on a truce. Afterall this was originally a Federal fort and later a Confederate fort and finally a Federal fort again. So I guess you have to have both kinds of soldiers.

On the other side of the island was the harbor that the fort was to protect. Today is it full of really expensive pleasure boats

Above is a seafood market, very pictureque.

It was a nice harbor and a beautiful site.

We spent the night in a motel outside of Melboune and the next day head to Fort Lauderdale to the conference that I was to attend. The conference though interesting to me would most likey be boring to you so I will just say that Karen got to lounge around the pool for a couple of days being waited on by cabanna boys, while I sat in meetings. I would occasionally get a 20-30 minute break, went to see Karen at the pool, She would share her fruit smoothie with me and say how sorry she was that I had to sit in boring meetings, and could I move just a little bit because I was causing a shadow. After the end of my last meeting I rushed by the pool on my way to the room to change. I had just found my swiming trunks when the phone range. It was Karen saying that she was headed to the room there was a big storm coming and it really looked like rain. Sure enough it rained the rest of the day, and was still fairly cloudy the next day.

We checked out of the hotel and decided to head north in hopes of finding a place where we could get out onto the beach and I could spent some time in the sun. We finally settled on the idea of returning to Amelia Island since we kind of know what was there and we could maybe do another bike ride on the beach and soak up some nice weather. When we are convinced that we could make it to that point Karen tried to call to find a room. No luck anywhere near the water or the town, but we were able to find a place near the interstate.

The next morning the woke to grey overcast skies. We headed into town anyway, in hopes of it clearing. We rented a couple of bikes and headed toward the beach. this time instead of a broad hard sand beach that was easy to ride, the tide was rising and the sand was starting to turn to mush, so we headed inland and rode on the edge of the asphalt road. At a main cross road we headed further inland and tried to ride the greenway nature trail. It had recently been mowed and the ground was pretty wet, so at the next cross road we headed back to the asphalt and to the bike shop to give it up.

Although it was still grey and overcast and cool we notice that to the north along the coast there seemed to be some blue sky. So we headed north to Savannah, surely they would have a beach and maybe even a sunny one. As it turned out we did find a really nice beach, it was sunny and warm and I, at least, enjoyed laying in the sun for a couple of hours.

After leaving the beach we drove to see the oldest Lighthouse on the east coast or at least in Savannah. and then headed to down town Savannah to see some to the things we had missed on our trip there a few days earlier.

The streets in Savannah are all pretty much lined with big trees over hangin the roads and walks

Houses range from fairly onate to modern and drab.

There are dozens of little parks spotted throughout the city where at the intersections of main roads. There is about a whole city block sized park sitting in the middle of the intersection around which you must drive to proceed down the street you are traveling. As a pedestrian these parks are a nice place to sit in the shade in a nice environment. It does slow down the vehicular traffic a bit though.

We found the City Market which was a two or three block long section that was dedicated to pedestrians only. The shops and restaurants often had displays or open air seating. It was a very pleasent place to spend a couple of hours and have a late lunch.

One of the things that Karen, the food channel fan, wanted to see was Pala Dean's restaurant. Luckily she did not necessarily want to try to eat there. The place was packed and the line went half way around the block.

We headed out about 5:00 in the afternoon and hoped to get to a point where we could spend the night and then drive on home on Friday which is what we did. We headed up the interstate until we got near the Blue Ridge Parkway and decided to take a detour off of the interstate and pick it up later. This would put us getting home on Friday pretty late, but it was a nice drive.

Dogwood and other native flowering tree were just blooming and gave the woods a soft pick, orange, green and frosty white look.

The Parkway is a very pleasant dirve. We had driven the northern section several years ago and have now completed the southern end. All we have to do is the middle.

These are afterall the smokey mountains. The layering of the mountains as they stack up in the distance provides some interesting views. We stopped at several lookout points, but soon found that we could not afford the time to stop at them all.

We got up to and elevation of about 6000 feet, and the difference in the vegetation and the fog that was present gave a soft pattern that would make a great quilt or a water painting.

Eventually we knew that we just had to head north and get home to we got off the parkway and headed to the interstate for the last leg of our vacation. All in all it was a good trip.