The Fords Arrive!

  September 23, 2013 – The Ford family hit the road this morning to begin their drive down to come and visit with us for a couple of days!  At this point in our trip we’ve been getting pretty lonely.  I never realized how much I would miss the sweet fellowship of our church family.

   Well, with the arrival of "company” it was time for Lydia to get a bath – finally! 

(It had probably been 4 or 5 days since she’d had a bath!)

Check out tonight’s sunset!

   After a long drive, the Fords arrived at our home-away-from-home and we ate dinner after taking in the view from the deck.

  Wow, what a blessing to have such good friends sitting around our dinner table and to have some fantastic conversations!  It was great to hear how everyone was doing back at home…they even brought back the remaining pieces of communion bread our church family had torn pieces from the day before.

  After dinner we took a relaxing walk on the beach in the dark and used flashlights to find crabs and shells.

Mexico Beach & St. Andrew’s

We heard from a neighbor that she 3 years ago she found some large shells at an isolated beach nearby. She gave us directions on where to go, so we packed up a picnic and headed for Mexico Beach (it’s still in Florida-not Mexico!) It was about an hour’s drive away.

On the way to the beach we drove through through Tyndall Air Force Base. We heard that the military flies their most advanced planes from Tyndall’s runways.

We found the road that our neighbor told us about, but it ended up that Air Force Base was using the land now and the road wasn’t open to the public anymore. We found a beach access a few miles down and setup our stuff on the beach.

We couldn’t find any large shells, but there were PILES of medium shells all along the beach.

After packing up some of the more unusual shells we drove back to Panama City Beach and went to St. Andrew’s state park and ate our picnic lunch.

There is a levee at the park that forms a bay-it’s a popular place for both SCUBA divers and fishermen. So, Benjamin tried both at the same time. He grabbed his goggles, snorkel and fishing rod and swam out all of the way out to the middle of the bay. Then he snorkeled and fished at the same time (that way he could “decide” which fish he wanted to catch .) He did catch one fish before we left the park.

The area was very scenic and I had a fun time getting photos. A US Coast Guard ship came into the bay from the ocean before we left.