It seems like forever since I bid you adieu. It felt like a good time to step away from the entire internet thing, go outside and clear my mind of the slime. I hoped to bring myself back to earth, focus on the Now. So I did, sort of.
It was late August when I changed my ways and I threw myself into the garden harvest, as well as pruning and moving shrubs around. By mid-September we were able to pull away from it and take a trip.
Casey has been steadily improving our campervan, Goldie, so we were anxious to take her on the road and try out our new canopies and storage. The Smokies is one of our go-to places, particularly Townsend, TN, “the peaceful side of The Smokies”; it’s only a 6-hour drive and it sits at the Cades Cove Entrance to the National Park. I managed to snag a riverside campsite for a couple of nights and we tooled on down, even though we knew that it was going to rain. Rain it did, damn near the entire time we were there. Because we were able to set up during a dry spell, it was a great test of our new awnings. It rained and rained and rained some more. We spent most of our time sitting watching the Little River flowing around the rocks, changing with every downpour. We watched squirrels and birds and walked around the campground watching people when we could. The last evening the skies began to clear, revealing a full moon rising above the mountains. The next morning the sun slowly rose in the same spot.
It’s always nice to come back home even if the trip is short and we got busy with the garden again. We’ve put a rock path from our Edible Garden to the firepit. The view is still weird since our neighbor dug a pond last summer and it’s only half full. By mid-October we were done, so we traveled down to Disney for bit. It was an impulsive trip, trying out something I’d been mulling for a while. We spent two nights camping in Goldie at Fort Wilderness and then moved over to our “home” motel, Pop Century; doubtful we’ll do that again as you lose a day making the move, even though they are only 15 minutes apart. From Fort Wilderness you can take a quick boat ride to Magic Kingdom; we wanted to see the new Castle Wrap and Fireworks. We had some inside information that Disney allows 100 people to watch the show from the top of the train station and we managed to be the first people up there! The next day we moved over to Pop; from there it’s a 15 minute skyliner ride to Epcot where we rode the new Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure (very cool). We’d never been over to the Boardwalk, which is just a nice boat ride from Epcot’s exit. It was lovely. As we returned, the full moon rose over Epcot.
All this time, I missed the blog. I did publish some genealogy stuff and have done a lot of research (so much for staying off the internet). I started planning a comeback a couple of weeks ago, hoping to give the site a whole new life, but was feeling a little shy. This is it, though. I’ll just upgrade my media space and slowly work on deleting any unnecessary photos and Sonnystone.com ought to be good for another ten years… We’re back!
Just in time for the holidays…
Peace
