Where are we now? Trip Number Seven.

Tragically, next week, for the first time in months, I will have to be in my office for five days in a row. I don't know how I'm going to bear it. I much prefer working off-site a few days a week.

In any event, I spent a few days in NOLA on Thursday & Friday, seeing a cousin who had been out of the country for two years. *Excellent* catching up with her; I'm hoping her years abroad are coming to an end and we can see each other more often now.

Thence to Pensacola, where the poet and I loaded up and headed eastward to the Atlantic Coast, specifically Ponte Vedra Beach, just south of Jacksonville Beach. Turns out that, if you look for a hotel a few days before a holiday weekend, lots of hotels are sold out! Huh. Who knew. Actually, though, the Ponte Vedra location worked out nicely. It was an easy drive to Jacksonville and a slightly longer but relaxing & scenic drive to St. Augustine.

St. Augustine, by the way, is a MOB SCENE. It's pretty cool but jampacked with tourists. I'd like to go back in the off-season (IS there an off-season?) The drive down the A1A is lovely, though. And the beach at Ponte Vedra is nice, good waves, not too crowded or rowdy. The poet was ruing his decision not to bring his surfboard, but he got some body-surfing in. I wish I could see without contacts so I could really let loose in the water, but being blind in crashing waves (even small ones) kind of scares me. The pool at the hotel is more my speed. At the beach, I stick to the kiddie-pool zone. Either way, though, I like being in the water. Must have something to do with my watery Scorpio nature. It's like the opposite of a traffic jam: all the stress is leeched out of my body, whereas in traffic, I turn into a whirling ball of stress.

Jacksonville has a great vibe, good sushi & thai & seafood restaurants, and the traffic doesn't suck. Also the Chamblin Book Mine is the most amazing bookstore, truly. I spent $70 on mostly out-of-print things, and could easily spend every saturday afternoon there, trading in books and hunting down treasures. You should see their Beat Literature section. I wanted the whole damn thing, at my house, I tell ya. I did buy a copy of Kerouac's On the Road, as my copy has gone by the wayside. No bookshelf is complete without a copy of On the Road.