2-4-14 - Blue Skies and Red Sand

After the ladybug incident it took us a few days to work up the nerve to return to the woods. Luckily the cold weather seemed to have demoralized the enemy forces, and there was nary a little bug to be seen, excepting the occasional straggler stowed away inside window frames and loose clothes. We horsed the van down a track of deep, soft sand, stopping halfway through to unload all excess weight and to air down the tires for extra traction. We just barely made it to solid ground without getting stuck and there we set up camp for a couple days. Just up the road I found some bones from an animal of some type, possibly a couple different ones mixed together in a bone pile. The skull looked canine, but the bones looked like a deer or other large mammal. Like a good scientist I tried to piece them together, but couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Jax did his own scientific investigation. Nom nom nom...

After a couple of days we left our little campsite in the woods, determined to finally head North out of Florida. We shot East over to Daytona Beach and it was there that I caught my very first ever glimpse of the Atlantic Ocean. The air was hot and humid, with a stiff wind coming up from the South. We walked down a weathered set of wooden stairs and finally set foot on the East coast. It's funny, I never thought I'd be there. It almost seemed more exotic in my mind than foreign countries thousands of miles away. Yet there I was, with my toes in the red sand, inches away from the roaring winter waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

We walked down the beach for a while, taking it all in and trying to comprehend the massive scale of this journey, of it all. On closer examination, the red sand turned out to be made up entirely of tiny shell fragments. It's amazing the things that lie just beneath our feet and go entirely unnoticed, till you just take the time to look down.

Dave caught a great shot of a surfer coming out of the waves to dry off and warm up. Although the weather was warm, the water was icy cold and the waves surprisingly violent.

Just as we were getting back into the van to leave, we heard a loud buzzing in the sky and glanced up. Two people slowly floated by, smiling and waving. They were seated, attached to a sail and powered by a gigantic fan. It looked like way more fun than any two people should be having.

They slowly floated down the beach into the distance. We hopped into our own brand of motor-fueled freedom and laid the pedal down, headed North towards new adventures.