My friend, Sonya Myers, taught me how to add a widget to my web site to allow you to “subscribe.” This means if you sign up with your email address, you will get the latest blog post via email. You won’t have to wonder when I will post a new blog, you’ll automatically receive it in your email. This is the closest I can come to making an email blast without incurring the wrath of the Yahoo Spam god who precluded me from sending it out to all my friends and family at once.
We got a good weekly rate for staying at Bay Point Marina, so we’re “off the water” for a week to catch up on laundry, clean the boat inside and out, re-provision, visit friends, experience cultural sites, eat the local delicacies, swim in a pool, walk on the beach, get an oil change, and clean out the holding tank and touch up the varnish. This list is not in chronological order, nor order of importance, but in some order that my brain imposed.
We had a wonderful weekend visiting our friends Brian and Ginger. Randy and Brian have been friends and finishing each other’s sentences since they were twelve. Randy’s and Brian’s brains each holds a “box of facts” that they use now to crack us up every five minutes, piling on one association after another. It reminds me of all the fun times I had in the creative world of advertising and marketing. Brian and Ginger live and work in Charlottesville and have a decompression beach condo at Virginia Beach. We had a mini-vacation with them this weekend and shored up our humour quotient by doing so. Ginger and I have met via Randy and Brian’s high school reunions and have “clicked together” based on shared values and outlook.
Ginger and I decided we were going to visit the Norfolk Botanical Garden and to our surprise and delight the guys wanted to go too. I recommend this garden highly to all who love beautiful places to stroll. The weather was perfect and the garden had much to display. We rode on a tram that gave us an overview of the 175 acres of garden, then with map in hand we concentrated our energies on a series of contiguous gardens: Japanese, perennial, hydrangea, azaleas, camellias, sculptures of birds, evergreens that took us back to the visitor’s center. Wow!
After a fabulous water-side lunch we headed back to the condo to gather beach gear. We set up a roomy beach cabana and chairs and had a delightful beach siesta, while preserving our skin from the bright sun. Saturday night we feasted at Aldo’s, a well-regarded local Italian ristorante, which offered marvelous ambiance, service, and dishes. I was in heaven, having lump crab meat for both lunch and dinner. Yum!
Brian and Ginger’s kitty who accompanied them to the condo is a sweetheart. Sabrina is a Bengal, a new breed that I don’t know how to spell or to describe properly, but she looks like the cross between a domesticated cat and a leopard, with fur so soft and beautifully marked with stripes and rosettes that she looks wild but acts very gentle. Her eyes and ears are proportionately huge in contrast to her diminutive head giving her a wondrous and ever fascinating look. Sabrina and I had some opportunity to play together in between our outings.
Sunday arrived with clouds and rain, so Ginger suggested we see the Chrysler Museum of Art. I enthusiastically agreed and the guys decided to go with us and give up watching the tennis and golf tournaments on TV. It was a wonderful collection taking us from medieval to contemporary art, beautifully described by plaques by each art work, making them a silent docent. Walter Chrysler, Jr. was the son of the founder of the Chrysler Corporation. Walter and his wife, a native of Norfolk, collected art and bequeathed their collection to this museum, which expanded to accommodate it. What a treasure it is to all who can visit!
Leaving Cumberland Island in South Georgia, we traveled up the ICW, came out the inlet between Jekyll and St. Simon’s Islands and cruised along the Georgia coast all the way to Beaufort, South Carolina where we headed in and wound our way along the ICW avoiding the shoals to an anchorage in the South Edisto River. 
On the 24th we did a gallery crawl along Broad Street and walked South of Broad into the neighborhoods. We paused for lunch at Blossom, a terrific restaurant as it turned out. Randy had a duck confit grinder (imagine a BLT on toasted french bread stuffed with shredded duck confit) with rosemary french fries ($9). It was superb. Suzanne had grilled tuna in a port wine reduction accompanied by coconut flavored sticky rice and seasonal veggies ($13). It was perhaps even better. 
After lunch we did some more gallery hopping where we met some very interesting artist/owners, including Victoria Platt Ellis who does some very imaginative abstract work using collage, oils, and stories as inspiration. She focuses on shapes and color making her work boldly captivating.
