How I Spent My Summer Vacation. v1.0

 June 2011   
        For the first time in many years I had the opportunity for an extended vacation this summer. Also Ruth didn’t teach summer school so we finally had some free time together. We had already planned two weeks off in June to explore the Louisiana portion of the Gulf Coast so when the opportunity came we decided to just extend our vacation as long as possible and continue along the gulf, across Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, the on to Jacksonville on the Atlantic side, then up the Carolina coast. We would go as far as we could, as long as we could until either time or money ran out.
       When I was young one of my many dreams was to be a marine biologist, but being landlocked in the Midwest that never truly seemed to be an option. Also being an Ozarks country boy I was just lucky to get to college. But that is another story.


Bayou La Fourche

        In 1993 I read an interesting book by Gunnar Hansen (a Norwegian), Islands at the Edge of Time: A Journey to America’s Barrier Islands, about the barrier islands along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, from Texas to North Carolina, and how they were in danger of rapidly disappearing due to many things, but mostly just abuse by real estate developers and overuse by people.        Reading that book made we want to do two things. One was to visit the barrier islands along Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina and the Louisiana swamps. The other goal was to someday travel at least part of the East Coast inter-coastal waterway. This summer I finally had a chance to have a little piece of that dream as we spent two weeks reconnoitering parts of America’s southeast coastal areas.