Florida wedding

We traveled down to the Jacksonville area for Heather's nephew's wedding. At Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve we came across these ruins. Florida is the state without stone and this shelly coquina is all that the earliest inhabitants had to work with.

Kingsley Plantation had exhibits about slaves working a cotton plantation. The girls learned how difficult it was to separate cotton seeds in the era before a certain Eli ginned up a mechanical separator.

The plantation dock reminded us that cotton and enslaved people were loaded on and off the ships

Mmm, plastic oysters

Indigo, sugarcane, and oranges were other cash crops on the plantation


We revisited Cumberland Island National Seashore with Tessie. It's not everyday that you get to play with an old payroll safe.

Back in Fernandina Beach, the pelicans were not about to let the girls enter their dock

At Fernandina Beach there was the unmistakeable pong of a paper mill. Following the train tracks outside our hotel led us to the source of the pong and this enormous mound of wood chips to fuel the mill. The perspective doesn't do justice to the size of this pile, as we witnessed a chipalanche big enough to bury a house.

The wedding was beautiful in the unusually chilly Florida air

Aunt Katy, Lyla, and Charlie visited for a high-energy weekend


At Boda Borg Caroline and Lyla completed 10 quests!


Erin showed off her pierced ears

We celebrated Caroline's 12th birthday

The whole team attended Heather's performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

"She loved winter, snow, and ice"

 January was strangely snow-less this year, which made for fantastic pond skating. 

Perfect black ice at Menotomy Rocks Park

 Tessie can now keep up with all of us on the ice

For the first time, the Arlington Reservoir was skateable, in places

 We skated up in the swimming inlet and then portaged across to the much bigger reservoir

Those black things are invasive water chestnut seedpods and they menace the reservoir in all seasons

 We even made it onto Spy Pond, where the ice fishermen out numbered skaters. We were having a great time until a policeman arrived and rousted us off the "unsafe" ice.

 Erin explored the swampland behind her school with some friends

 An ent!

 How were these thin sheets of ice formed, suspended in the marsh grass a foot above the ground?

More mysterious ice 

 Erin and Caroline continue to swim for the local rec center team

Heather loves doing math problems with the girls 

 and sometimes we send them to explore the sewer

or practice being scientists