It has been a long time since we blogged, exploring Florida and visiting with relatives and friends has kept us busy.   We know, not really an excuse 🙂 but the warm humid Florida weather moved us into a much slower gear.  We changed from National Park reporters to embracing the love of family and friends.

We owe my cousin Craig McGarvey in California a debt of gratitude for creating the McGarvey family link lost long ago.   He contacted my east coast cousins and we managed to meet six of them for the first time !!  Thank you Craig 🙂

We started with two cousins in Maryland with Peg being the first cousin we met and she started the ball rolling with so much love and energy.   She gave us a tour of Baltimore MD that we will never forget and filled us in on the east coast McGarvey’s with whom we had lost touch.   Her stories of her parents and our grandmother were fascinating 🙂  She even remembered my mother when we lived in the Philadelphia area.

Next came Darrell and my cousin Sue in Ocean Pines MD who took us to the Atlantic beaches of Ocean City and shared with us knowledge of my cousins further south in Florida.  We had a nice lunch at a seafood restaurant with a great view of the working fishing boats.  They both made us feel so comfortable with their relaxed enjoyment of life 🙂

We headed down the coast to St. Augustine FL and met up with “Bunny” who has the same name as my sister, Patricia Ann 🙂  After a nice lunch with Bunny we went back to her house to meet her son JP and to harvest her grapefruit, satsuma, and tangerine trees.  Finding such wonderful citrus fruit in your backyard isn’t something we see where I grew up 🙂  We loved the stories she related of the east coast McGarvey’s and of her own life, we are grateful to have her new found friendship!

Roni and I headed south along the Atlantic coast to Vero Beach and the fine company of my cousins Rick and Bill and their wonderful wives Barbara and Peggy.  They had a huge room reserved at their condo for our evening party with more food than anyone could eat.  It was great fun but partly tempered by my cousin Steve and Gigi being unable to attend because their daughter Christina had just been released from the hospital.  Steve knew so much of the McGarvey clan and we treasured Bill for his descriptions of his siblings Sue and Craig 🙂

We spent time in the Everglades, then went back to the Atlantic coast near Miami to visit with Steve and Gigi.  They were nursing Christina back to health and entertaining Gigi’s cousin Anke from Germany when we arrived.  We had a nice lunch in their nearby restaurant, and talked about our collective families.  We had to focus on being social while our eyes continually drifted to look at their magnificent view of the beach and ocean, lol 🙂

One insight all my cousins gave us was stories of their parents, my father’s siblings.  It is fascinating to learn about family when you know so little about them to begin with 🙂

You notice Roni was finally in one of the photographs because we had Anke take the pictures 🙂  Roni was our designated photographer for all the other cousin photos.

As Roni and I have been visiting friends and family, we have to admit to a different kind of enjoyment in our precious venture.  The joy of learning the history and culture of so many places in America is great, but visiting with friends and family brings a completely different warmth and happiness that we cherish.  We will have more blogs on our friends and Roni’s family in the coming weeks.

Thank you for following our blog!  You can find more pictures at http://compositionbyjohn.com and http://facebook.com/compositionbyjohn

 

 

OK, a show of hands, how many of you have ever heard or been to the Congaree National Park?  We thought so.  Most of you are as clueless as us 🙂  The park was officially made a National Park in 2003 so no one can fault us, but we can all make an effort to see it 🙂

Let’s start our walk through the park.  The short stubs of wood sticking out of the ground below are known as “knees” of the cyprus trees, no one really knows why they are formed.

The fall colors were still present down here in the largest tract of old-growth bottomland hardwood forest remaining in America and the dry year gave us a different view of this unique national park.  In the rainy winter, the lands can flood so high that fish can swim on the numerous boardwalks though the park.

This park is amazing in it’s biodiversity.  What is hard to realize is that most of the southeast portion of America was once covered in this type of ecosystem.  There are over a dozen champion trees of various species that make their home here.  The periodic  flooding of this land makes for a wonderful changing landscape that many animals and plants thrive on.

As with so many of the National Parks we have had the pleasure to explore, it was only because of the dedicated volunteers, the generosity of so many interested in conservation, the tireless efforts of our elected and public officials, and the remarkable dedication of our Park Rangers and staff that we have these treasures of Nature in our country.   Please make an effort to explore and enjoy the parks we now have, promote the future parks, and lobby our government to preserve and protect our national treasures!

Thank you for enjoying our blog 🙂  We love your feedback and comments!  For more pictures of this wonderful park, please head to http://compositionbyjohn.com or if you prefer Facebook:  http://facebook.com/compositionbyjohn

John and Roni