Friday, December 23, 2011


This gentle giant of a giraffe peers at visitors to the Jacksonville Zoo during our stop there while we were enroute to southeast Florida.

SNOWBIRDING— 
20011-2012 style

We said good-bye to winter Dec 16th and a leisurely four days later arrived at our winter digs in Vero Beach, FL.

Our first stop was about 3 hours down the road from home where we enjoyed granddaughter Brittany Wolf (right) receiving her graduate degree in occupational therapy from Shawnee State U in Portsmouth, OH.

Portsmouth also is known for its marvelous display of murals painted on concrete panels on the dry-side of their Ohio River flood wall.

From there we breezed past Charleston then ground our way through rainy-snowy darkness on our meandering ascent of the West Virginia Turnpike to a fuel stop near Beckley at about 3,500 feet above sea level.

We paid close attention to the falling temperature during our ascent.  It dropped to 34 degrees and was headed down as we stopped for fuel.

I was seriously considering that for our first over-night stop when a friendly truck driver told me the local forecast was calling for an overnight accumulation of ice and snow.

We offered her our thanks and hustled on down the road; relieved by a slow climb in temperature as we lost altitude through Fancy Gap into Wytheville, VA and a very welcome late dinner at the Log House Restaurant which resides in a building born there in 1776.

It was meaningful to contemplate the colonies when the walls that surrounded us were hewed from local timber and fueled the westerly expansion of our then yet-to-be nation—as we munched our tasty steak dinners.

The following afternoon we visited daughter TJ and family in Jacksonville, FL then took a peek at the city from across the St. John’s River that evening (below).

Our story will continue soon with our final stop on the way south in St. Augustine.  Please stay tuned.

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