Sitting, reading, dreaming and gazing out at the world ...

Shoreline Park, a perfect place to gaze at the world.

Some days all I want to do is find the perfect place to sit, read, dream and gaze out at the world.

Lucky for me that I happen to live on the Florida Panhandle and close to the beautiful beaches of the the Gulf of Mexico. This is the land of water, water, everywhere. So almost anywhere that I can sit and look at the water is the perfect place to read, dream and gaze at the world.

Since I'm also a writer, it should be the perfect place to sit and write too. But some days it's best to leave the writing to those voices in my head. Some days it's best to just sit and maybe think about writing.

Shoreline Park is one of those places where I can sit in the shade of a gazebo and gaze out at the world. Hmm! Is that where the word "gazebo" came from? Just wondering.

Well, last night was a rip-roaring storm that brought an abundance of lightning, thunder and rain. The temp yesterday reached the mid-90s, but the much needed rain dropped it back down to the low 80s. Ahhh, a temporary reprieve from those hot, hot, HOT days of summer.

The air today is humid, thick, heavy, almost dripping. The rain could start again any minute. But then the sun breaks through the clouds for a moment or two. Then it's cloudy once again.

This is one of those days where I don't feel like doing much of anything.

Florida is a State of Mind

A typical Florida day at Navarre Beach.

I fell in love with Florida years before I moved here. A childhood friend of mine had vacationed in Miami and came home with stories about the beautiful beaches, palm trees, a rainbow of flowers, bright blue skies, huge white marshmallow clouds and water that went on forever.

To a Southern California beach kid, I think I was seven at the time, Florida sounded like paradise. I vowed then and there that someday I'd go to that exotic land.

Through my school age years I read what books I could find at the library and learned about crocodiles, sea turtles, dolphins, manatees and colorful fish. I was hooked. I was also surprised that the state didn't have any mountains. How could that be?

The west side of Navarre Beach.

I've always been in love with the beach, so heading to Florida, a state surrounded by beaches, was just a dream away. I could envision swimming in those turquoise waters and building sandcastles in that sugar-white sand.

As years passed I met more and more people who had either vacationed in Florida, lived there or intended to travel or move there. I kept that goal in mind as I went through college and started a family. Florida was out there, on the other side of the world it seemed, just waiting for me.

Sometime in my mid-twenties I was introduced to the wonderful Travis McGee books by John D. MacDonald. I raced through that series and knew that Florida was where I belonged.

Eventually, my husband, Ben, and I moved to Florida. By that time, his parents had retired to the Florida Panhandle and mine were working on the east coast, in Daytona Beach. So we also had the excuse of moving closer to family. It was also a great place to raise our daughter.

We started out in Pensacola, on the Florida Panhandle, just minutes away from the Gulf of Mexico and those beautiful beaches I'd been dreaming about all those many years. After a year we moved to Ormond Beach, which is a bedroom community right next to Daytona Beach. A couple years later we were back on the Panhandle, in Fort Walton Beach. The next year we were living on a bayou off Escambia Bay.

The east side of Navarre Beach.

Florida is a state of mind, one of exotic sights and sounds and smells. In the years we've lived here, my husband and I have traveled from one end of the state to the other.

The Keys and Key West are favorites, so is Sanibel Island. Orlando is exciting with Disney World, Epcot, MGM Grand and Universal Studios. The Everglades is filled with those alligators I'd read about as a child and every kind of bird you could imagine, my favorites being Great Blue Herons, Egrets and Osprey.

The best part of Florida is the beaches, every kind of beach you can imagine. The beaches of Miami and Fort Lauderdale are trendy. Sanibel beaches are wall to wall seashells. In Daytona Beach you can drive along the sand. In the Keys, the beaches are thin strips of sand with turquoise waters in every direction. The Panhandle beaches are sugar-white sands, sand dunes covered graced with gently waving sea-oats and the most beautiful turquoise and emerald waters you've ever seen.

A view of Navarre Beach from the pier.

I fell in love with Navarre Beach from the very first moment. Back then, thirty years ago, only a few cottages and motels were built along the beach. You could walk at water's edge for miles if you wanted and only see a handful of people.

Now there are high-rises built along the west side of the Navarre Beach Pier and untold numbers of huge beach houses. The west side of the pier has been left in its natural state with the exception of a scattering of picket fencing designed to protect the sand dunes.

My husband and I have lived in Florida off and on over the last thirty years. We moved away to Las Vegas for eleven years, but frequently vacationed back here and checked on our bayou house that was rented out to a succession of renters.

When my husband retired we moved back to our bayou house, which had to be renovated after renters tore up the house and hurricanes took out dozens of trees. Living on the bayou was never the same after Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and Hurricane Dennis in 2005.

Our house was built on tall pilings, so it didn't flood. But most of the other houses around the bayou flooded out and many were never rebuilt. After a couple years we sold our house and moved away to the Texas Hill County. But like I said, Florida is a state of mind, and it didn't take us long to move right back. Plus, our daughter and grandkids are here, so we're back in Florida to while away the days.

The Pier Bar at Navarre Beach.

We now live only a couple miles from Pensacola Beach. If we had the energy, we could walk or ride our bikes over the bridge, but we don't have that kind of energy these days.

Our beach days are only now and then, for leisurely strolls along the beach or sitting under beach umbrellas and gazing out at that turquoise water. Florida is a place to dream about warm sun, tropical breezes and paradise.

I'll be doing a lot of Florida posts this month, so please check back for more photos of other Florida beaches, the Everglades, the Keys, Sanibel Island and even Orlando. This is a beautiful, exotic state and I hope to share it with you all.

For those who know I love to add lists of books to my blog posts, here's one I'm sure you'll enjoy. As I already mentioned, I fell deeper in love with Florida while reading John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. So here is a list of those wonderful books in order. All the series is now available in eBook format for those, like me, who love to read their books on a Kindle, Nook, iPad or other eReader.



Floridians fishing on the Navarre Beach pier.

The Travis McGee Series by John D. MacDonald:

The Deep Blue Good-By
Nightmare in Pink
A Purple Place for Dying
The Quick Red Fox
A Deadly Shade of Gold
Bright Orange for the Shroud
Darker than Amber
One Fearful Yellow Eye
Pale Gray for Guilt
The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper
Dress Her in Indigo
The Long Lavender Look
A Tan and Sandy Silence
The Scarlet Ruse
The Turquoise Lament
The Dreadful Lemon Sky
The Empty Copper Sea
The Green Ripper
Free Fall in Crimson
Cinnamon Skin
The Lonely Silver Rain

Me on the pier with the beach high-rises in the background.

I've read every single one of the Travis McGee books and highly recommend them all. I guarantee that you'll soon fall in love with Florida too.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my book, Bayou Blues and Other Sorrows, which is a collection of eight short stories and eight poems, many of which originated from the years when we lived on a Florida bayou.

The cover on Bayou Blues and Other Sorrows is from a photo I took of a sunset on our bayou. Yes, Florida is a state of mind.

BAYOU BLUES - Amazon/Kindle/US

BAYOU BLUES - Amazon/Kindle/UK

BAYOU BLUES - Barnes&Noble/Nook

BAYOU BLUES - Apple/iBookStore/itunes

Bayou Blues and Other Sorrows is also available at Sony, Kobo, Diesel and Smashwords.

Bayou Blues and Other Sorrows is a collection of short stories and poems touching on issues that all may face at one time or another, from lost love to life changing crossroads to moments of pure happiness. These are heartwarming stories you won't want to miss.

The short stories are:

"A Kiss is Just a Kiss" – People are not always who and what they appear to be. A kiss is not always just a kiss, it may have consequences.

"I Love You, Joe Montana" – This is a story about love renewed.

"Checking Out" – There are many crossroads in life. Check out? Or is life too beautiful to leave behind?

"The Night of the UFO" – Pure happiness can come at the oddest of moments. So how many Whiskey Sours do you need to see a UFO?

"Earthquakes" – Some people enter the world with a bang.

"Faded Love" – Faded love is better than no love at all.

"Harry's Garden" – How far will a scorned woman go to get even with her cheating husband?

"Old Dogs Need Love Too" – A story about love lost and love found.

The poems are: "Bayou Blues," "Cartwheels," "In a Café," "Sweet Lips of Time," "Barefoot," "Sunshine and Promises," "The Turtle," and "Tumbleweeds."

I hope you'll give Bayou Blues and Other Sorrows a try. These are heartfelt stories and poems which I believe you'll savor and enjoy.

As always, please feel free to add comments below. I love hearing from my readers. Also, feel free to add Florida books that you have written or your favorites from other authors. Be sure to check back from time to time for more Florida posts.

Pensacola Beach and Tropical Storm Debby

Tropical Storm Debby, Pensacola Beach, June 24th

Most of my posts have to do with books, but this one is all about Pensacola Beach and Tropical Storm Debby. For several days now we've been watching Debby forming in the Gulf of Mexico. Would the storm actually reach tropical storm force? Well, yesterday it finally became the named Tropical Storm Debby. Now we're all waiting to see if it becomes Hurricane Debby.

Like many others living along the Gulf Coast, my TV is tuned to The Weather Channel. Those spaghetti lines, or spider lines, depicting the possible path of Debby holds us enthrall.

It's a love/hate thing. Storms are exciting and awesome, but also destructive. So on the one hand we'd love to see the mighty power of a hurricane and yet we want to avoid all the bad, dangerous things that come with a storm of that magnitude.

I woke up this morning to a phone call from my mother, who lives in the Atlanta area of Georgia. She wanted to make sure I knew that The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore was at Pensacola Beach this morning. Well, I'd heard last night that Jim had arrived and was already reporting on the storm. For those in "the know" about bad weather, Jim Cantore gravitates to the bad stuff to report on the worst of the weather. So having Jim arrive on our beach, Pensacola Beach, with a tropical storm and possible hurricane heading our way, well, that's not a good sign.


Let me back up to yesterday. It was a sunny, hot, humid 90 degrees. At midnight it was still 90 degrees. When I went outside with my dogs, Shani and Dude, at close to midnight, the air was fragrant with the smell of salt spray and flowers. The air was beginning to stir and there was the prickly feel of an impending storm.

Watching Tropical Storm Debby from the Dock

Now flash forward to this morning. The sky was painted in various shades of gray depending on whether you gazed north, south, east or west. Clouds raced past at breakneck speed, some clouds heading NW and others SW. These are the feeder bands for Debby which is slowly building out in the Gulf.

After a late breakfast, my husband and I drove to the beach, only a couple miles from our house. Just a hop, skip and a jump over the bridge and we were there facing the building force of this Hurricane Season's first Gulf storm.

I must say the waves were awesome. Now by southern California standards, where I grew up and learned to surf, these waves are nothing. But considering Pensacola Beach rarely has waves more than a couple feet in height, these are awesome waves for this beach.

Now, my surfing days ended decades ago, but I still love watching the waves. There should have been surfers out there, but a Red Flag Warning was posted and no one, not even surfers, were allowed out there. I guess the lifeguards didn't want to be forced to make any rescues today.

There were a fair number of lookiloos out on the beach. Some, like me, ventured to the edge of the surf. Most stood way back and just watched. This being a Sunday and all, it was obvious that many locals left church and drove straight to the beach. Even for people who have lived here all their lives, and seen many a tropical storm and hurricane, seeing the beach under storm conditions is a big draw.

We looked for Jim Cantore, but didn't find him anywhere. I imagine he was taking a break when we were walking the beach. Too bad, because I would have liked to meet him. Maybe tomorrow if he's still here? On the other hand, if Jim stays at our beach then that may not be a good omen.

I took a few dozen photos of the beach. In person, the surf was choppy and awesome. Unfortunately, the pictures I took don't do it justice. My husband took some clips with his movie camera, so I'm hoping he got some good footage to post on youtube.



Tropical Storm Debby, west end of Pensacola Beach.

We'll probably venture back to the beach tomorrow to take some more pictures, assuming Debby increases in force and is still close by. She'll most likely be a hurricane by then. Like I said, I'm awed by the power of a hurricane, but don't really want it to make landfall anywhere. I'm sure we can use the rain all around the Gulf Coast, well, maybe not in Pensacola, but so far no rain for our part of the Florida Panhandle. 

Stormy greetings from Pensacola Beach.

In reality, it's too bad we can't send the tropical rains to Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico to put out their fires. But nature doesn't work that way. One part of our country burns while another part get deluged with rains and another part gets torn apart by winds. Go figure.

As I'm writing this, The Weather Channel just reported that the projected landfall is Apalachicola, Florida, to the east of us. Debby is supposedly only moving at 6 mph, so still a long way out.