Travels

We recently escaped. Had ourselves a little getaway, to a tiny little town in a remote area that we didn't want to leave. I will avoid boring you with the 178 pictures I took, so I'll just hit some highlights. Afterward, I bet you'll want to visit, or at least will dream up a little weekend away yourselves.

As you may know, we are drawn to the water.

We love old houses, so we stayed in one. I wish my driveway looked like this.

And that I had giant magnolias flanking the house. Seriously, they're huge.

Anyone who can keep their gardens this well tended in the middle of a July drought clearly works herself to the bone. I know.

But what I really fell in love with was this abandoned house. I'm not talking a little love, I mean I fell in LOVE with this house. Instantly. Head over heels. I want to move in tomorrow. I want to strip it down to the bare floors and windows and paint the walls white. It would be my dream weekend getaway, we'd sleep on the floors for a while, barely add any furniture, have the basics only and canoes, bikes, kayaks, long summer days. Sigh.

I had a favorite boathouse too. It rained a couple of times while we were there and the family would gather on the benches under its cover and watch the storms come in. It's the little things a place like this makes you remember.

Of course there were the sailboats.

The one in the middle below was from Topeka, KS. I thought that was funny.

The green of the grass gets me.

The houses were old and spread far from one another.

I'll be back to visit the hundred and some odd year old lighthouse. The water was too rough to go all the way there, the sun was setting with not enough time for us to climb to the top, but we will be back. We'll go to the top and I'll try not to think about scary movies when we do.

Isn't it hard to plan a trip away? It is. It is. Especially when there are kids and you leave them behind. But each time we do it we are reminded how important it is to remember what we are, what we used to be, what we can be still, even in the midst of crazy, busy, life.

Old Country Road

It all happened so fast I wasn't quite prepared last night, but by 6 p.m. I found myself standing alone in my kitchen, with no husband or children and the sudden realization that it would be this way for the entire night and right then it seemed so quiet, and calm, and nice and I think my spine even tingled when it dawned on me that I actually had some alone time. My brain raced in a thousand different directions. The big question: what would I do with this spur of the moment free time?

What is "free time" anyway when you're a mom entrenched in the day to day mixed bag that is keeping a household running, keeping 3 kids fed, clothed, reasonably clean, engaged, learning, nurtured and loved and doing basically the same for a husband all while having this little "Walter Mitty-esque" side line that is a small business and it's offshoots (a.k.a. blog, new love of photography), not to mention somewhat of a real life that could be a PT career if I so chose?

Whatever it is, it certainly is different for each of us, which is one of the lovely things about life. We are all so different. I thought I'd really like my favorite little dinner, so I went and bought it. I thought I'd really love to have a little photo excursion, so I grabbed my camera. It was a beautiful night and while I was tempted to go toward civilization, I quickly turned my car the opposite direction and headed straight back out toward the countryside from which I came. You know, that place where the corn meets the beans.

And the roads seem to disappear into the fields.

Old barns and outbuildings dot the landscape,


and the trees sometimes cover the roads.

Now you might be thinking we live out in the "boonies" and I'm tempted to let you think that, it sounds so romantic and wild but the reality is we don't. We're really only 5 minutes from the huge upscale mall in town and only 20 minutes from the other huge, upscale mall in town, soon to be followed by more and more huge malls in town that are slowly, one by one, creeping their way out toward where we live. So we have the benefit of conveniences almost at our doorstep, but we can still just cross over one simple little county line and it looks like this:

and this,

and the sunsets can be seen without any trouble at all.

When the words won't come

One good thing about this blog (at least from my vantage point) is that when there are days like today and I don't have much to say, I can always fall back on the pictures to do the talking for me. So enjoy a few and I promise I'll follow up with some stories later.