January 28, 2015, Sebring, Florida

This challenge is in response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Express Yourself.” I needed a prompt to blog during our “down time” to handle the mundane tasks of life.  Today, I am supposed to finish preparing our taxes for our accountant. We’re due a refund so I don’t need much motivation, but being a full-timer now, makes it so hard to sit inside the camper while it is a GORGEOUS day outside. I’ve already put it off enough and today is my deadline.  So after reading Ingrid’s blog post this morning, I decided to take a quick detour and join this weekly photo challenge!

There are four things in this world I love as we travel. So first, the foundation of our marriage began walking on a beach in Jacksonville, Florida 40 years ago, just about to the month!  We were “falling” in love and discovered we both love the beach. Here is a picture of our recent walk on Little Talbot Island near Jacksonville.

Bill lived in Jacksonville, FL soon after graduating from Vale Tech training institute. He fell in love with the beaches and vowed to never move north….then he met me (Debbie), who was from the north. And like the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years, it looks like we’ve been wandering that long too!

We decided to travel full time because we no longer care, where we live (in a stix and bricks house). Because as much as we love the beach, we’ve decided it’s not the place to live…permanently! We love to visit and during the off season! We just bundle up a bit!

So the next thing we discovered about each other is that we love to visit historic places, museums and gardens. So while in Jacksonville, we went to a garden/museum we had not visited before, the Cummer Museum, a garden and art museum. Now this was a bonus visit as it also had a great water feature, the St. John’s River! My words just can’t do it justice! And then this fabulous urban museum overlooks the St. John River where I captured a boat gliding by with a bridge just peeking through my pictures. This was once a sanctuary for a family to express themselves, entertain and eventually help rebuild Jacksonville after the great fire of 1901.

And then our third love, we discovered we had was in July 2003, hiking! After we moved to Florida in 2005 (the Bible says God will give you the desires of your heart, so this was after 30 years of marriage), we thought our new found love of the mountains was never to be revisited.  But alas, in November 2013, we discovered we could easily find ways to hike. We just take our mobile-home with us and go to the mountains. And have we ever!  Here are a few snaps of our most recent visit to the mountains, near Franklin, NC.

We discovered our love of hiking goes back to our childhoods. Bill played in the hilly woods growing up outside of Pittsburgh, PA. And I spent a glorious six years in Colorado Springs, CO as an adventurous little girl.

So this brings me to our last great love of things on this earth and it is because of this, we have become full-time RVers! So we praise God for whom all blessings flow for delivering to us the next best thing in life, next to our own child, is our grandson! You see, when he was born, we lived 800 miles apart. And we were in Florida where Bill had yearned to return after our marriage nearly 40 years ago! So here I sit in the warmth of Florida while I blog, and thinking on these things that really help express who I am!