Travel

This is the second post of our series about our anniversary trip to Savannah. Read about Day 1. On our second morning we stumbled out of our bedroom and were greeted by our Airbnb host Sue, who offered us some hot tea. She made us a breakfast of vegetable frittatas served with corn tortillas and roasted brussels sprouts and tomatoes (she said the tomatoes were just to give it a little color). Sue was a great cook, and if I lived closer to her I would probably start a food blog starring her. While we ate we told her about our plans for the day and she told us where we could get free parking. We did some touring the…

On Tuesday there is a Farmer’s Market in the Waterfront District of Gulfport. I’ve loved this place ever since Jake’s parents introduced us to this place a few years ago (during one of our wintery visits). With all that’s been happening with our new home and business, we’ve been forgetting to get out and enjoy ourselves once in a while. Well at the beginning of this week I marked my calendar and Jake and I took off for Gulfport. It’s a beautiful place to walk around, with plenty of shade on the sidewalks. There weren’t quite as many kiosks as we saw at the Saturday Morning Market in St. Petersburg, but it was less crowded and more relaxed which made…

We’ve been spending a lot of time exploring the area, and one thing I wanted to cross off the list early was a beautiful sunset on the beach. I wanted it to look romantic, and what location could be more romantic than Honeymoon Island. I was excited on Friday evening when Jake and I packed up our camera gear and headed for the state park. I wore a breezy pink dress that I knew would look good with the sun shining through it, and it whipped around in the wind as I walked down the shoreline. The ranger said that the gate would close at 8:20, but with all the cars still in the parking lot, we felt confident that we…

I was beginning to regret our decision to walk to Lige. The road from our hotel to the small lakeside village ran along the steep slope of a dusty mountain, bustling with traffic and littered with small stones which occasionally tumbled from above, coming to rest on the cracked pavement. The heights made Dannie nervous, and the sun beating down on was burning our skin.

The Grand Buddha of Leshan towered over us, hundreds of feet tall, his giant head haloed by the afternoon sun. We were surrounded by people, hundreds of them, maybe thousands in the Leshan Buddha Park, and more in the tour boats in the river behind us. At an alter in front of the statue, Chinese tourists waited with uncharacteristic patience to kneel and offer a prayer before moving on. Dannie read from our entrance packet that ancient Chinese rulers had built the Grand Buddha statue, along with the thousands of others in the park, in order to spread Buddhism and to earn good Karma for themselves, presumably moving one step closer to enlightenment. Contemplating the years of labor this must…