Skip to main content

A Long Drive

I finished and turned in my latest book on Tuesday. Yesterday was a beautiful day, sunny but cool, so my guy and I decided to get out of the house and take a long drive. The roads were virtually deserted until we got into the city, but we didn't plan to get out or stop anywhere. We just drove east until we hit the ocean. This is Ormond Beach, a little north of Daytona:

Ormond is more of a locals' beach, but still, I've never seen it so deserted on a nice day. There are usually hundreds of people at this beach. I kept looking at these two chairs and wondering if I was in the Twilight Zone.

We then drove back home the long way, via a scenic highway route we like to take through the marshes and woods.

My guy spotted something we'd never noticed before -- an old pair of brick smoke stacks in the woods, so he decided to stop there to check it out. That was how we found this:

We love old buildings, so we walked back to have a look.

Colonel Dummitt is better known for his citrus groves, which he cultivated south of here in Brevard County, but evidently this is where he set up his slave-run sugar mill to make rum (he did that in Barbados before the English abolished slavery there, and forced him to go.)

Seeing the remains of a 195-year-old mill was a bit surreal. The whole site is surrounded by a tall fence (through which I shot most of my pics.)

Another lady was there with her husband taking pictures; their car had Alabama plates so I imagine they were on vacation. We waved to each other and smiled, but stayed too far away to talk. In front of the ruins was a field of weeds and wild flowers filled with butterflies.

I'm glad we went, even if the experience was a bit sobering. We've decided that (unless gas has to be rationed or shelter-in-place orders are issued) that we'll go on a long drive once a week, just to get out of the house for a bit.

Labels:

Comments

nightsmusic said…
What's left of those stacks is pretty awesome though it's a shame that no one can seem to leave anything alone (graffiti.) The pictures on the beach are what I'd like to see when I've been to Florida, rather than the crowds I can't stand being in anymore.

I'd take a drive every day if the weather was better and my Mustang was out of storage. But it's not, and I hate the everyday vehicle I have now (my choice got poo-poo'ed) and don't like driving it so I'm only going where I have to. The plus side of this though, if you can call it a plus, is that our road, which better than tripled in traffic after it was paved, has quieted down to almost no traffic at all. It's nice for a change.
March 19, 2020 at 8:02 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.
Post a Comment
Read more

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to...
Post a Comment
Read more

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.
Post a Comment
Read more