Tuesday, June 23, 2015

To The Beach

My wife is a San Diego girl.  She grew up with the beaches not far away.  Well, here in the Asheville area, the beaches are very far away.  So to keep the peace, every now and then we head off to someplace that's on the ocean.  We went to St. Augustine, Florida, last fall and really liked it.  So we decided to return to the same little beach house.  And we invited the son, daughter-in-law, and grandson to share the experience.  

Lots of heat.  Family in close quarters.  Sounds like a recipe for a nuclear explosion, doesn't it?

Actually, we all had a lot of fun.  We were together when we wanted to be, we wandered off on our lonesome when we wanted (except the grandson), we ate too well, got too much sun, rode bikes, went shopping, did some sight-seeing, and generally had a good time.  Vacations are supposed to be like that, and this one was.

It almost didn't turn out that way.  The day before we were to leave, our car got a flat tire.  I was out running errands and came out to find the right rear corner sagging to the ground.  Fortunately, we were taking the truck to the beach, rather than the car, so it wasn't a calamity, just a real PITA that I didn't need at the moment.  I changed the wheel right there in the grocery store parking lot and went home to load up the truck.

Then, while getting stuff packed in, the garage door somehow got activated and caught on the truck, then automatically reversed, there was this horrible screech, and the garage door was jammed up and wrenched crooked.  Oh, great!  Something was obviously destroyed in a very expensive way.  So out came the toolbox.  Pretty soon I found that nothing was broken, but that one of the cables supporting the door had come off the pulley.  So with a bit of pulling and prodding, along with a massive dose of cussing, we eventually got the wire back where it was supposed to be.  Whew - disaster averted!

We were afraid that we were having bad karma and that it might carry over to the trip.  Fortunately, it didn't.  The drive to St. Augustine is long (almost 9 hours, with stops every couple of hours to stretch our legs).  We had no trouble going down or coming home.  Our truck ran like a train all day.  Good stuff.  

I was able to go off and do some painting in St. Augustine.  The most interesting places for me were over on the Matanzas River, which is the inland waterway.  Here are three from that area:

Butler Beach Inlet
Oil on linen panel, 9"x12" 

Fort Matanzas
Oil on linen panel, 9"x12" 

Marsh
Oil on linen panel, 9"x12" 

These were fun little landscapes to do.  I started a portrait of my daughter in law as well.  It needs a lot of work in the studio before anybody will ever see it again, though.

We've been back for a few days and are playing catch-up.  Had to get a new tire for the car, mowed most of the lawn (amazing how weeds can grow so tall with no rain), J has gotten a lot of weeding done, I'm finding out what happened with work, had to replace the lenses in my glasses, gave the dogs their baths, had to take two watches to the repair shop ... you know, the usual stuff.  Getting back to normal.  Gotta get into the studio here pretty soon, though - there are things that need to get painted.

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