This non-travel update is for the third week of April in Jacksonville, Florida, April 16 – 23. As a reminder, we had been staying at the Flamingo Lake RV Resort in Jacksonville, Florida, USA since January 23 so I could get a cochlear implant in my right ear at the Mayo Clinic here. So, we were settled down for 3 months, unfortunately, and our travel life was relatively dull.

Google Timeline:

I’ve recently learned that Google Maps has a “timeline” feature that shows where my phone has been over the past six years. It puts a red dot on every location. It was fun to remember these locations. You can see our trip around the US and our times in Mexico, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Italy and Thailand. It put a dot on Shanghai, China, but we were only there in the airport for about 12 hours during a layover.

The Cochlear Implant:

We went to Mayo Clinic for my third “mapping” with Millicent, my audiologist. A clinical account manager, Kellie, was also there from Med-El, the company that made my implant. They gave me four new programs to work with and I’ve been evaluating them. They also put me in the sound booth and did an audiogram with my new hearing and here it is for my right ear.

The blue line is where my hearing used to be. The red line with triangles and circles is where it is now. You can see that I’ve lost all my natural hearing in my right ear, as a result of the surgery. That often happens and I was prepared for it, but I was a little sad about it. The red line with “CR” is my new hearing with the cochlear implant. What you can see is that now I have a relatively normal hearing response at 20 to 30 decibels across the entire range of frequencies from 125 to 6500 Hertz.

This is a good thing!

So, mission accomplished. Our 3 months in Jacksonville have given me better hearing and I’ve had time to get used to the two different sound processors and the various accessories like chargers, batteries, clips, etc. I feel comfortable traveling with it all.

We Grilled Out One Day:

Which was fun, I haven’t cooked over charcoal in a long time.

Sweet Pete’s and the Cummer Museum:

Five years ago we went by Sweet Pete’s Candy Store in downtown Jacksonville and Patti wanted to go there again.

“Sweet Pete’s is the largest candy store in the southeast. Located in an historic 22,000 square foot mansion in the heart of downtown Jacksonville, Sweet Pete’s not only offers thousands of varieties of candy and hand-crafted chocolates, but we bring guests into the candy making experience.”

Here we are in their special sitting area where people get their pictures taken.

Here’ our picture from when we were here five years ago (February 2018).

You can look down into their candy-making operation from a balcony. The smell from here was very nice and sugary.

And they have this photo-op for being an angel, which Patti enjoyed.

We each got an ice cream sundae at the bar and had a fun time walking around the three floors of the candy shop.

After that we drove over to the Cummer Museum. I had read that this museum is free on the 2^nd and 3^rd Tuesdays of the month, and, me being cheap, that appealed to me.

“The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens is a museum located in Jacksonville, Florida. It was founded in 1961 after the death of Ninah Cummer, who bequeathed her gardens and personal art collection to the new museum. The Cummer Museum has since expanded to include the property owned by Ninah’s brother-in-law, but it still includes her original garden designs and a portion of her home with its historic furnishing. The museum and gardens attract 130,000 visitors annually.”

They have a selfie location furnished to look like Ninah’s house, with some of the same windows and doors and paintings.

It’s not a huge museum, you can see on this map that there are about 13 galleries and the garden is out back.

I enjoyed the paintings, I thought this still life with flowers and fruit was pretty.

They had a gallery of American artists. I liked this one by Thomas Hart Benton called “June Morning”. It’s a view from his mother’s house on Martha’s Vineyard in 1945.

I also liked this one, by Edmund William Greacen which is a view from his window in Brooklyn, NYC in 1916.

They’re having a Flamingo exposition right now, called “Flamboyance!”.

“The pink flamingo—an iconic garden motif that is unquestionably Floridian. In the Museum’s first ever horticultural exhibition, 50 topiary flamingos planted with pink flowering begonias will take over the Museum’s historically significant gardens, providing a fun, ironic, and whimsical riff on the classic garden ornament. Posed in groups throughout the gardens and grounds, the flamingos are a playful juxtaposition against the formality of our gardens, inviting visitors to experience the landscape through a new lens of color and creativity.”

Here’s Patti in the garden with a few flowery flamingos.

This was an interesting room. The big cut metal cube was hanging in the middle of the room and it had two bright lights inside. Shadows were cast on the walls. It reminded us of the metal lamps that we saw in Morocco that were smaller versions of this.

Here’s our shadows.

That was fun.

After the museum we headed back home and got there in time for Jeopardy!.

Crooked River State Park:

This was our last day trip for Jacksonville. The park is up in Georgia, a little less than an hour’s drive away.

When we got there we stopped at the visitor center to get maps and recommendations from the rangers. Then we drove to one of the trailheads and hit the trail.

There were quite a few Longleaf Pine trees and they looked pretty against the blue sky.

Along the salt marsh we found this large, old, twisted tree trunk that we liked the looks of.

At lunchtime we found an empty picnic pavilion with a view of the river and had a pleasant repast. Patti made a batch of chicken salad yesterday which we ate with chips and an apple today.

After lunch we went by the nature center where they have a few aquariums and some stuffed animals and two volunteers. We petted the rat snake and looked at the turtles. I watched this Diamondback Terrapin tear a fiddler crab apart.

After the nature center we hiked some more trails. At one point we were walking through the campground and saw this Gopher Tortoise.

He was just rambling through the campground eating bits of grass and other small plants. They’re fun to watch.

Down by the river we got this selfie with crooked branches behind us, and behind that the Crooked River.

There were a lot of Fiddler Crabs in the mud along the river bank. I watched them for a while as they went about their day.

It’s a nice park and we enjoyed our day there.

Three Month Summary:

Well, it’s hard to believe we’ve been in Jacksonville for 3 months. It’s been kind of boring, but I needed the time to get the implant surgery and then get used to using the new equipment for hearing. I feel like I’m ready to travel again and we’re both looking forward to hitting the road and seeing new places.

Future Plans:

• April 23 – May 2: We’ve got an Airbnb reserved in Cocoa Beach, Florida about 3 blocks from the beach and we hope to see some rocket launches from nearby Cape Canaveral.
• May 2 – June 13: we’ve got a mobile home reserved at the Twin Shores Mobile Home Park on Longboat Key near Sarasota. We’ve stayed at that park before but in a different unit.
• Jun 13 – 29: We’ve got our first House Sit scheduled in St. Augustine, Florida. We’ll be taking care of a dog and 3 cats while their owners go on vacation to the British Isles. It’s a nice 3-bedroom house in a gated community about 5 miles from all the touristy stuff people do in St. Augustine, we think it will be a good time.
• June 29 – July 5: we’ve got an Airbnb reserved in Ellijay, in the north Georgia mountains. We’re planning on doing some hiking in the mountains there.
• July 5 – 11: We’ve got our second House Sit scheduled in Columbia, South Carolina. We’ll be taking care of two dogs while their owners go on vacation.
• July 11 – 12: We’ll be staying with friends of ours at their house in Bonneau, South Carolina
• After July 11, no firm plans yet, but we’ve been talking about possibly spending a couple of weeks in the Cincinnati area and after that flying Norse Atlantic, the new long-haul, low-cost airline, from JFK to Oslo then spending a couple of months in Norway. Then maybe a month in Denmark.