Magical Days Again

We hit the camping a bit earlier in the week this time, due to an accidental booking. It was great though, I came packed prepared for surfing and biking and it was a good thing. It was cold and the waves weren't breaking well enough to endure the temperature the first morning. I did get in a 20 mile bike ride and felt fortunate that I wasn't the casualty of a spring break driver heading down A1A. Lots of motorcycles everywhere because of bike week, and truthfully, if I owned a Harley, I'd have been out riding there as well. I had to laugh a bit. I can easily remember the days when it was commonly said that a woman couldn't be strong enough to handle a Harley. I sure saw plenty of women driving them and not all of them were big and tall. Funny thing about stuff we used to know as facts that turned out to be way off.

This was a trip of cold in the morning and night and warm by lunchtime. The lesson we have learned from backpacking is that it's all about the layers. Zip-off pants, 3 shirts, boots and flipflops. You just have to love this time of year in Florida. For some reason, it was cold with less wind than usual, so we had these great clouds of mist in the morning, and fantastic stars at night. We walked from morning until way past dark and when we weren't walking, we took our bikes and got lost in the Palm Coast area, which was another adventure all by itself. 

We learned a lot from our ranger friend at the campground, finding that it could be a decent place to fly fish. He and a buddy went out from our site the first night, promising us fish for dinner and instead came back covered in mud. Apparently, the flats can be a bit like quicksand and one wrong step and you're up to your waist in it. A vision came to mind of a Redfish laying there in the shallows and telling the rest of his friends "Hold my beer" while he splashed around the soft sand spot. Nobody really knows if fish laugh or have a sense of humor, but if they do, we might have heard something that evening.

Our ranger was unable to provide fish for the dinner table, but the spirits of the fishermen were not dampened a bit. They both swore to come back and get those Redfish and get them good. Unfortunately, that never happened as far as I could tell, and I was left with the strong opinion that the only fish in those waters are much smarter than the folks with the fishing poles. 

We went for a long walk and were surprised to find a big pile of firewood stacked by our campfire. Not only was that a pleasant surprise, but we seem to have been blessed with God's own firewood.

 Those pine logs burned as if gasoline had been poured on them.

When we weren't sitting around the campfire, cooking or eating, we were walking the park. Even the deer in the Preserve were getting used to seeing the Perkins brothers there and hardly paid us any mind at all. They just looked interested for a brief moment as if we might have something good to eat, and then sighed and went back to grazing.

Each trip, it seems as we get a little bit closer to the perfect experience. Steve found what could be the great idea for a tent, as long as you don't sleepwalk at night or don't have to pee in the middle of the night. His new man-powered vehicle, the Catrike turns out to be the right tool. He can keep up with us no problem on our bikes and his back problem that prevented him from biking was not an issue. The only issue I can see is that he is somehow seeing this as his "wounded warrior" chariot, seeking a Don't Tread On Me flag to go with his giant USA flag on the antenna on the back of the bike. We are already hearing tales of "back in WWNam", so I'm not certain where this will take us..

The Letters From The Big Island: Part 1 - The Oldest Lady With The Bestest Location

This trip was to be an adventure, a way of saying that after being married 30 years, we still knew how to have fun. the first thing I wanted to try was a Bed and Breakfast, which I had shunned before. Here, on the Big Island, a B&B seemed much cheaper than a hotel, so we tried out a place that turned out to be most interesting.

Amy, our hostess was 91 years old, and sharper than me. She gave me something to hope for, a chance to believe that growing old doesn't necessarily mean the wheelchair and endless re-runs on TV. We spent the night in her very old sprawling house, mere feet from 100 foot cliffs down to the ocean. It was near one of the two main towns on the island, Hilo (pronounced 'heelo'). She had dogs, a cat, and a lot of personality. 

A major plus for me was she happened to live right next to the only active surf spot I found on the island. In fact, after exploring the island for 10 days, it was the only place I saw any surfers out. I stood at the mouth of a river that the local surfers used to paddle out and shot photos for over an hour. Girls were ripping it up out there. It was head-high and looked easy except for the rocks everywhere. I even saw a guy about my age, looking very out of shape, getting some waves on a longboard. 

I got up early the next day and shot my first Big Island sunrise. I was stoked beyond belief and it was only day two of our journey!

The Frozen Floridians and Accidental Magic: Paul Plans, God Laughs

Not every single mile of the Appalachian Trail is something wonderful that you want to remember. In fact, there are some spots that we would prefer to not think about when looking back....this is one of those places we will never forget.

We were enjoying our lunch on a long log at a gap between two mountains in the nice warm mid-day sun. It was hard to believe the heat we were experiencing after the cold of the previous night. I was fixing my next to last Mountain House meal and Paul was enjoying a well-deserved cigarette, while Chase was taking advantage of an opportunity to take a quick nap. It was one of those UN-scenic spots, featuring a giant run of power-lines, and a gravel service road running through the gap. It was a reminder that even though we were in the middle of nowhere, civilization wasn't too far away. It was still mighty peaceful, the only sound besides the buzzing of the power-lines was the sound of Paul warming up to another story.
I heard a gravelly noise nearby and looked up from my stew to see Paul's face contorting and his eyes going wide. It was an expression that I hope I never see again...

It had started off as a beautiful morning. We were somewhere in North Carolina, the day after the coldest night ever, and I was still alive and I had gotten a bit of shut-eye. My new sleeping bag had become my most favorite thing in the world, right next to a cup of good coffee. Speaking of which, I had convinced myself while at home packing for the trip, that I didn't really need good coffee while backpacking and took a baggie full of some Spanish brand of Instant coffee that tasted almost as good as dirt. This wasn't strong South American coffee that was an acquired taste, this was just plain bad coffee. I had plenty left over at the end of the trip. I would have left it on the trail as Magic for another hiker, but that would just have been mean.

A few of our new friends from the night before had hiked off early to their cars and the ride home, doing a fast 13 mile march, knowing that good hot food and nice warm beds were waiting for them. Paul had decided that we needed one more night in the woods, so we were going to hike to a shelter that was only a little more than a mile from our truck.  Chase had mentioned several times that if we just hiked that little bit more, we'd have a steak dinner and be back home in our beds by 3 am in the morning. Paul would have none of that, so we hiked slow, taking our time and enjoying the weather that was nothing like Florida, or possibly like Florida on it's best day. We had plenty of food, plenty of time and the only worry on our minds was making sure that we didn't get to the camping shelter too early. 

It was lunchtime and we were taking it easy before the next ascent when Paul got that horrific look on his face and everything we thought we knew about the upcoming last day of our trip changed for good. Paul's cigarette fell from his mouth, I spilled stew on myself and Chase jolted awake at the sight before us. On the road below, were 3 vans with the name of a local church on them and out of the vans were spilling a horde of preteen boys with backpacks. It wasn't difficult to tell that many of them looked ill prepared for the trail, with giant packs and heavy sweatshirts. There were a few counselors scattered among the children and I watched with interest while the group assembled, not thinking of how this might affect our own plans. Paul, however, instantly knew that this was a less than desirable turn, and quickly ran down to the person that appeared to be the leader and conversed with him at length. He came back with his head hanging and announced to Chase and I that the group was heading to the same shelter. "There is only one thing we can do, " he said, "beat them to the shelter and claim it for our own.."

What Paul had not counted on, was the church group had a secret weapon: two older teenage boys that could hike faster than Chase could run, and soon our leisurely last day of heaven turned into some kind of trail race. I was left behind, limping with my bum knee, feeling bad, but not as bad as the counselors I passed by, with kids sitting and crying on the trail. I saw an iPad laying on the trail, and several men carrying their pack and someone else's at the same time. Who knew that a kid could grow up in the mountains without knowing anything about hiking? 

The day turned into a long pattern of leapfrog. We would pass the two scouts for the church group and then get passed by them. Instead of fun, it became a competition. 

I saw the look in Paul's eyes and knew that it was no longer about the serene peace of a night under the stars, it was about winning. Finally, it was late enough in the day that Paul announced that he and Chase were going to take off and capture the shelter for us and save me a place. I agreed that sounded like a good idea and decided to take advantage of my time alone on the trail, pretending that I was an adventurous solo hiker, doing the AT on my own. It was a great feeling, listening to the woods and my thoughts, occasionally interrupted by my encounters with whimpering young boys sitting on the trailside with their large packs. I was very glad that I had someone show me how to prepare for these trips and how to bring as little as possible. I walked alone until it was almost dark, thinking I would finally arrive at the campsite of my dreams with another large fire going to help keep me warm while I prepared my last cup of hot chocolate before climbing into my beloved new sleeping bag one last time. Instead, I ran into Paul and Chase on the trail, coming back towards me, Paul with a look that was even worse than the one that I had seen before. One thing we had not taken into account was that the last shelter being only a mile from a parking lot meant easy access for locals. This translated into Paul finding a shelter full of rednecks with booze, a bonfire and a lot of whooping it up, and no room for a bunch of weeny backpackers.

So it was, that our last night of happiness under the stars, or even a sizzling steak dinner, morphed into a drive-through at Burger King and a hard bed at some Pakastani roadside hotel with Cheerios for breakfast...after you paid through the bulletproof window of course.

Author's note: My mother's last request of me was to keep writing. This one is for her.

The Woman That Got Me Started: Kay Francis Perkins

Kay Francis Perkins died after a long illness on January 24th, 2018 in Orlando, Fl, at the age of 80 in her home of 51 years.

Kay lived a long, adventurous life and was the proud head of a large extended family. The grace with which she carried herself through her days, was something admired by all. She was always more interested in the other person and left everyone wishing they could be more like her.

She left home at an early age to be an Air Force wife, not knowing that the title of homemaker was a moniker that ill-described the life she would end up living. She raised four children with her husband, while traveling the United States, often moving every six months. That turned into seven years of raising the children on her own while her husband was held as a Prisoner of War in North Vietnam. During that time, she went from wife and mother, to activist, to the point of speaking before the National League of Families and traveling to the Paris Peace Talks in 1969.

In 1973, she was re-joined by her husband, Glendon, and they spent the rest of her life together, traveling the world, this time for fun. During this period, she entertained and was entertained, to the point of dining with the President of the United States. She loved Europe and the Smoky Mountains, and she preferred to travel in style, enjoying quiet times with a good book, a cup of tea, and her dogs.

After her children grew up, she attended college at UCF and then went on to teach at the local Naval Training base, helping young aspiring submariners overcome the stress of Naval School.

In mid-life, she had a battle with Breast Cancer and that fight turned her into an elder athlete. Her passion became Water Aerobics and we all watched in amazement as she got an even brighter sparkle in her eye as she got stronger and stronger over the years.

Her family grew over the years and was filled with grandchildren and great grandchildren. All of them wishing for just a little more time with Granny.

Then, Parkinson’s came, an illness Kay knew well. Her father had died from it before she was 22 years old. She stayed tough, going to events, joining dance groups, becoming an expert on the disease, and preparing her family for her eventual passing.

Kay somehow maintained an elegance and grace that seemed more befitting royalty.

She is survived by her husband; Glendon, children: Ed (Pam), Paul (Dawn), Cindy (Jeff) and Steve (Lori), 12 grandchildren, 8 great-grandchildren and her brother; Floyd Kinney.

Her greatest wish was to be remembered as someone that loved their family more than anything else in the world. She kept a daily journal until she could no longer write. Her last entry was "Be brave, have courage, and love life".

The First Freezing Camping Trip of the Year

Here we are again, camping in Florida, that strange place where your fingers and toes are numb from the cold one day, and you're sweating in shorts and flip flops the next. In winter time, that is, there is nothing but sweating in the summer, and that is why we love the unpredictable weather of our winters. This weekend, we burned through a truckload of firewood and boxes of hot chocolate, while re-telling our heroic adventures. It no longer matters how many times we've told the same stories, they get a little better each time. Pretty soon it will reach the point where I'm telling about how I taught the Hawaiians how to surf, Steve was the one that really found Osama Bin Laden, and Donald Trump came to Paul for business advice.

I'd really like to add new relatives to our camping group, but no one seems eager to join...

We have added bicycling to our list of activities that must happen on the trip, and I have learned that no matter how cool Steve's trike looks, it takes me about twice the effort to get around on it. He has a bad back, so he is just glad to have a machine that he can ride in comfort. I think I will stick with my fat tire bike that only takes about 1 1/2 times the effort of a normal mountain bike. We rode the whole campground area and that takes more than an hour. In the ride this time, we discovered that although the park was totally booked that weekend, we were almost the only ones there. We did notice that the park ranger kept coming to check on us, perhaps because he knew we were the only ones smart enough to know how much fun it is to camp in a tent when the temp drops below freezing?

In our favor, the wind died down to nothing and at dawn the water was a mirror to the sun breaking through the clouds over the ocean. The only thing better than getting photos of this sunrise was the clear sky on Friday night. I have never, anywhere, seen so many stars in the sky. In fact, this was the first time I was able to see clouds of stars. My very first thought was to add a telescope to my list of things to pack. I'm still not really sure how a telescope could improve the site I beheld that night.

The Frozen Floridians and Accidental Magic: Part 5

Finding heaven on top of a mountain when it's below freezing is not easy to do. In fact, out of the whole trip, the thing I dreaded the most was trying to get through the night of extreme cold that was forecasted. I expected something similar to what I had experienced in the cold before, only worse. I imagined spending over 12 hours in a sleeping bag, trying to find some position that would result in me feeling comfortable enough to get any sleep at all. The first night of the trip was bad enough. We woke up in the morning to gray skies and a howling wind that went ;right through our jackets. It wasn't any fun packing up and I kept making mistakes that resulted in me pulling everything out of my backpack to put one thing away. My fingers weren't working right and my brain was only a little bit worse. I was reaching hard inside me to find what it was about backpacking that kept me coming back. It sure wasn't this part. Paul and Chase thought it was a good time to get going, and my thoughts of having a nice cup of coffee and bowl of oatmeal were put on the back burner.
It was a mere 15 minutes later that we encountered one of the strangest things about hiking: the weather changes frequently in the mountains. Somehow in the dark, we had found the single most exposed, freezing cold spot that there was. Not long after we departed our camping spot, we found ourselves on the sunny side of the mountain and peeling off layers of clothes. We were already laughing about the cold night and looking forward to the bright blue sky and the great feeling of doing anything but shivering.

If you have read any of my writings about backpacking before, you know I have this thing about meeting people 3 times and becoming old friends. That happened on this trip, and we became quick friends with a guy and a girl in their 20's that had driven up from Jacksonville. He was a seasoned backpacker and she was a tall athletic person that was up for anything. And that is why we kept bumping into them on the trail. They could go quicker than us for a while, but the girl would have knee issues and we would come across them resting for a bit on the side of the trail. We'd stop and talk and finally found that we all had the same destination in mind. She asked if we minded them camping with us that night and we were delighted to have the company, plus Paul would get some new companions that still had not heard all of his stories.
It was a perfect day, but I was worrying anyway, because everybody we met on the trail was talking about the deep freeze that was coming that night. Me, with only a fishing buff on my bald head, thinking about how far it was to safety and wondering why in the world I thought it was smart to leave my gloves at home. Paul was feeling great. He was certain that changing his eating habits had cured him of the many aches and pains he had experienced on previous trips. In fact, he and Chase were racing ahead most of the time, while I hung back, hoping that the little tweaking feeling in my right knee wasn't going to turn into something worse. It was getting the point that any mistake I made, stepping on a root and sliding or coming off a loose stone, made me want to yelp. Yes, this was not a feeling you wanted to have deep in the woods when the temperature was destined to drop into the 20's.

However, the day ended on a high like I could never have imagined. We found the campsite, and oddly enough, it was right in the middle of the trail. Not only that, there was a stream running right next to the lean-to. (By the way, normal for the Appalachian Trail is the campsite is half a mile off the trail and the water is even further away). By the time it got dark, there were 7 of us. 7 hikers that were crazy enough to be out in weather like this. 5 of us squeezed our tents into the lean-to that was built for 4 without tents and we didn't mind at all, but that wasn't the good part.

Paul, is a great believer in minimalism. You carry what you need, you eat what's easy, you don't do anything you don't have to do, except smoke a cigarette about every 30 minutes....and do not try to find the logic in that....but, he never builds fires on backpacking trips. You eat, get in your sleeping bag and wake up the next day...the night is not your friend.

But...nobody ever taught the young guy from Jacksonville those things. He built his girl the best fire ever, and the rest of us helped a little bit and enjoyed it a lot. We sat around that night for hours, trading stories and learning about how we were all drawn to do this outdoorsy thing in a bit of an extreme way.

I've had a lot of fun in the woods, but there's nothing much better in life than a big fire right when you need it....now I remember what keeps me coming back.

The Last Christmas Present

Have you ever had something just pop into your head fully imagined? That does not usually happen to me. When writing essays, stories or songs, it is something more like I'm on a journey and don't know where I'm going or where I will end up. This time was quite different, it was almost like the story was beamed into my mind. I can still remember standing on the beach and wanting to find paper and pen fast before the vision of the story left me....and yet, it never did.

One thing must be cleared up first......my Dad doesn't surf (he tried once) and he is still around and we get along fine.




ONCE UPON A TIME..............


It fell to me of all people to do this thing. My life has been the road. Everything I need or want fits in a carryon bag and that's how I like it. If I had a hero, it had to be the fictional character, Jack Reacher, the man that tosses his clothes when they get dirty and buys new ones, not in a desire to be wasteful, but in a move to have no dirty laundry to carry around. This life has been good to me and I have been rewarded with a career that demands precision and the ability to make quick decisions and let go of things that don't work well.

So, perhaps it was fitting that upon arrival at my parents' home for the holidays, I found the one thing my mother wanted most was for me to clean out the garage of my father's belongings. He had passed on more than 6 months ago, and no one had the heart to do what needed to be done. My father and I were never close, in fact it would have been difficult to find two people that were as different in personality in the same family. Where I found joy in a minimalist existence, he found happiness in the mementos from his life. His garage was full of those things. I could remember thinking back when I was young that he liked his things more than he liked us. Looking around, all I could see was junk, yet I felt there was something in there somewhere that was worth finding.

My dad was a private man, he spent more time off surfing than he did with us. I can still remember getting sad when I saw how happy he was when he came home with a  new surfboard. I wondered if I would ever see him that happy to play with me. Most of my memories of him involved me watching him waxing boards, hanging up wetsuits, and talking to Mom about the great waves he got after a session at the beach.

I guess this job fell to me because everybody knew that I would be the one that could throw away all of Dad's cherished possessions. I could do that. It wouldn't be that hard for me to get rid of things that nobody needed anymore, but there was something out here in the garage that needed finding. There was one little nagging thing from my youth that I wanted to put to rest for good.

Dad was an odd duck by anybody's standards and one of his little quirks was thinking that objects carried memories with them. I tried on more than a few occasions to get him to demonstrate a provable example of that. He would just shrug and say that it worked for him. He could hold up a toy from his childhood and say that it immediately brought back memories of playing with it, where he was and who he was with. I responded that it was merely visual clues and his brain was doing the work, not the object. Dad paid me no mind and would go about caressing some old knickknack and getting that wistful look that I was quite accustomed to seeing.

There was one truly weird story that Dad told. It had me looking around the garage more closely than I would have. He used to speak of a yellow Hansen surfboard that he owned. I remember it being a big deal because it cost a lot of money and he and Mom argued the day he brought it home. He was really careful with that particular board, but in spite of that, he had an accident while surfing that injured him and the board. The way he told the story, some blood from a cut on his knee, found it's way into the break in the fiberglass on the surfboard and created a bond between them. So far, this was a typical Dad story. He went on to say that the board spoke to him in his mind. It told him if he promised to keep it safe, it would save every memory of every wave he rode and would let him replay that memory by just touching it. That sounded like my Dad alright, but I was a little concerned about the talking board stuff. It wasn't like it was the only crazy thing my Dad ever did or said, but that wasn't the reason I remembered that story.

As my Dad got older and finally got to where he couldn't surf anymore, He still kept that one board around, and it was starting to look old as well. Dad seemed to spend more time near the board and many times, as I thought about it, he was laying a hand on it. Well, if it made him happy in his old age, then what was the harm, right?

And...it wasn't all that hard to find after all. Over in the corner, under a blanket and still covered with dust, there was a dingy, dinged, faded yellow surfboard, brown spots everywhere with "Hansen" on the deck. So, this was it. Are we talking magic? Or one more person falling prey to my Dad's flaky beliefs?

I wondered why I thought it was even possible that it contained memories...that was stupid, and yet, no one was looking and what would it cost me to try?

I reached out....