SallyAnn and I are celebrating our 39th Anniversary today. The first photo was taken at our wedding reception in Pensacola, Florida 39 year ago this afternoon. We enjoyed a short honeymoon in Florida and New Orleans before I moved my bride to our new home in Tucson, Arizona where I was attending graduate school. We resided there until July 1976 when we moved to our present home in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. The second photo was taken yesterday at Jefferson Rock, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (where that state meets Virginia and Maryland at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers). Thomas Jefferson visited here in October 1783 and wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) that "this scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic". I agree. Certainly worth the short drive from our home in suburban Washington, DC. It is the site of the October 1859 attack by John Brown and his band of abolitionists against the town's strategic federal arsenal. A pitch battle between the Union and Confederate forces also occurred here in September 1862. Sally Ann and I have been visiting here regularly over the past 30+ years . . . a fun place to escape the city and the 21st century. SallyAnn is my sweetie and my best friend forever. Here's to at least 39 more year together!
I have now returned home to suburban Maryland after a long month traveling in the desert Southwest and throughout California from the Mexican border to southern Oregon. It is difficult to fathom that Sally Ann and I have only been home five weeks since the end of June having also spent three months at the Sabbathday Lake cottage on True’s Point, in New Gloucester, Maine. Sally Ann, who has spent the month of November visiting Florida and cruising the Caribbean, has also returned home and so we have a lot of catching up to do. It feels good to settle back into our own lives and routines again, especially as we enter the holiday season. Too bad that I have come down with a horrendous head and chest cold which promptly knocked me off my feet.
One of the items high on my list of things to so is the resumption of regular postings on the Looking Toward Portugal blogspot. I will soon be sharing excerpts from my travel diary recorded during my recent road trip on the western edge of America. It should be up in the next week or so, depending on my recuperation. I also have several new random notes to post later this month and early in the New Year.
In the meantime, however, it is time to get better and to reacquaint myself with the more fast-paced life of the metropolis. Here’s wishing you and yours a festive a safe holiday season.
Check out the "Looking Toward Portugal" Facebook page for more information and photos.
" 'Rabbit rabbit rabbit' is one variant of a common British superstition
which states that a person should say or repeat the word "rabbit" or
"rabbits", or say the phrase "white rabbits", or some combination of
these elements, out loud upon waking (or first moment) on the first day
of the month, because doing so will ensure good luck for the duration of
that month. Today, it is a frequent tradition in many English-speaking
countries." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_rabbit_rabbit I have been humming this tune all day as I drove across Southern California and Arizona.
