Way up high
And the dreams that you dreamed of
Once in a lullaby...
By tomorrow we'll be sliding down the rainbow and all of this will be a dream, which will fly back like melting lemon drops warming our cold winter nights with sweet memories. As for today, we began, as usual, with a cup of ambition at the closest Starbucks we could find. Then, like good little Floridians, we headed for the beach, not just any beach, but the best beach: Boca Grande where the sand is soft and the water is blue. We waded into the gulf all the way up to our calves (No shark courage, after all), and wandered around the very well heeled community of Boca Grande where the houses are indeed grand and the people scoot around in electric golf carts. We had a wonderful lunch at the 3rd Street Cafe where sweet young Noreen served us. She is a local girl from the mainland (Not a silver spooner) who said she's building her finances in order to go to Naturopathic school out West in Portland. While she has a ways to go as waitress, I loved her outlook and her effort. At one point in our chat, she dropped her life guiding quote, "What you think is what you attract." I asked her if she really believed that and she replied, "With all my heart." I can imagine all kinds of things about her, but instead I wrote a quote back to her, which of course was, "Life is good, especially today." After lunch, we left sweet Noreen to her own devices and headed South for the final time. We checked into the motel for our last night in Florida, and spent the afternoon musing about the trip: best motel, worst motel, best experience, overall best human, best road, best Civil War site, best meal, worst meal, etc. On the way home I'll write the last blog entry, which will be the "Tale of the Tape". As Ed says, we see things through a different prism, which basically means we shared a trip, but had individual perceptions. I'm glad we did it, and while Ed's condition changed a bicycle tour into a 7,350 mile driving adventure, it was all for the best. Along the way, we saw much, did more, learned some, and, as Mark Twain posited (paraphrasing), " We scrubbed some of our bias off, shed a few of our bigoted presuppositions, and grew in our ability to accept fellow humans (Especially each other)." Above all, we're thankful for the opportunity. And as a last word, I think we squeezed the lemon into a pretty sweet glass of lemonade.
What a wonderful world.
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