Hello me!
At least, I assume you must be me because there are zero people reading this blog at this point. Not that that matters really. I'm here for one thing, and one thing only. I'm going to update the adventures that I had this past year, and throw up a bunch of pictures onto a page so in thirty years I can point to it and say "oh yeah, I did do that". Exciting.
This past Spring Break of 2018, 14 friends and I loaded up four cars and drove many states over into Florida to enjoy a Spring Break beach vacation. (On the way we stopped at Rachael's grandma's house in Tyler shout out for letting us stay there). When we arrived in Pensacola, we could hardly believe our eyes at where we were staying. A dirt cheap campsite right next to the beach would be ours for the next four days? Couldn't be. And yet it was. We were in our personal slice of paradise with our friends, and were raring to relax, swim, and explore.
We used the first day entirely for the beach. Swimming, reading, that game of Frisbee where everybody decides to not catch the disk, and anything we wanted to really. The beach was clean, white sand and was devoid of inhabitants. The wind gently tickled the skin, and the sun was near enough to be warming, but distant enough to not burn. As the day wore on, a steadily approaching storm-front, clearer than a black pen on paper, marched toward our beach. I led an outcropping of us on a foolish mission to climb and explore the WW II behemoth cannons hidden under a mountain of sand that lined the beach we were on. The storm hit right as we made it, and we retreated in haste down the long road as stinging bullets of rain fell down upon us. All that kept us safe was a massive warm tent and a dozen other friends playing cards back at camp.
One of our days on the beach, we decided to travel to the nearby naval air base. There was a massive aviation museum inside, and inside that there was a congressional conference ongoing about Islamic extremists in South America. We spent our time there and moved onto a beach underneath a lighthouse to have a group picnic, far across the harbor from our campsite. We climbed the lighthouse, tumbled back down, and then Jacob and I found an old Confederate fort in which nothing happened at all. Don't ask us sometime if you want to hear more.
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| Some Beach Babe |
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| Fancy Congressional Hearing (they had great desserts btw) |
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| A Friendly Picnic! |
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| Ascending the Lighthouse |
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| The Staircase |
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| A Fort Wall |
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| Fort Interior |
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| Add caption |
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| The American Flag flying over a former Confederate Base |
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| Some Beach Babe |
Eventually our time at the beach was up, and with a sunset birthday party for Devin, we packed our camp up, and went to the final stop on our Spring Break grand tour, Nawwholans.
We arrived in New Orleans to a truly hellish monstrosity of traffic. It wasn't a good time. We rushed to unload the two airbnbs that we had booked for the day, and then hopped right back into the cars to go down to the French Quarter. The buildings in New Orleans are the first thing that you can't help but notice. They look like dollhouses that were tossed into a trash compactor, and then left to find a way to fit together. The bright colors draw you in, and the tight streets make you feel like you're part of the action. As a whole, the city is a force of nature, an assault on the senses, and a really confusing time. You can see, hear, smell, and feel more at any one moment than what is usual to feel in a whole weeks time in any regular city. Late that night we went to Pat O'Briens to have a meal and one of their famous Hurricane drinks. The drinks live up to their name. I'll let that tell that story. I believe we went to Cafe Du Monde, but don't remember much other than their tasty doughnut-like treats.
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| Dear. Goodness. |
The following day, we went to the New Orleans Art Museum, and it blew me away. I've been to plenty of art museums. This blog alone can attest to that. What surprised me most was a new art form that I had never seen before, but was apparently something they do yearly. This museum held a contest where they asked floral arrangers to "recreate" paintings by making live flower arrangements of them. I'd prefer to let the pictures do the speaking here, because the art left me without words.
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| No thanks. |
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| Me. |
On our final day, we toured around New Orleans' downtown for a time longer, and went to a street of bars and Jazz clubs to get the full experience. We listened to a band called Raw Deal, and listening to them made time fly faster than a European Swallow, and blessed the ears with every passing note. We sadly packed up our bags, and took our final Polaroid picture of the trip (shout out to Caleb Martin), on the steps of our AirBnb, just before we left.
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| Preston??? |
Next I'm going to write up a recap of my short time in Seattle this summer! Maybe...
