Island Time

I got a lot of messages from friends after my last post. It seems discovering that we aren't as independent and self-sufficient as we believe is something we've all experienced. (Thank you for the many amusing stories.)

This post started as a post about the bike trip we just took. But Hurricane Florence tore into the Carolinas. Suddenly I didn't want to write about bike rides. Too many friends were in the path of the storm.

I had a friend who confessed she got through her first hurricane in a bathtub, covered by a cot mattress, clutching a bottle of scotch. I thought she was just being funny. Then I lived through my first hurricane. It was terrifying. But the storm was just the beginning. After the storm moved through, there was the clean up. The repairs. The rebuilding. For us. For our neighbors. For our town. For every town in our county.

So Al and I spent last week on beautiful St. George Island in Franklin County, Florida, biking the 20 mile circuit of the island, the area's miles and miles of bridges and causeways, and the scenic coastal highway. The weather was lovely, mostly sunny, a touch of rain, but exactly what you expect for summer in Florida. We enjoyed the sound of the surf and the view of the beach from the deck of our rental place.

And I followed posts from my Carolina friends, feeling sorry for what the storm was doing to their homes and towns, but happy that they, and their families, were safe.