Our 41st Anniversary Trip—Part One

For our vacation observing our 41^st anniversary, Ginny and I traveled to a cabin at Lafayette Blue Springs, a Florida state park about ten miles southwest of Luraville, a place so far out in the deep woods there was no cell phone service and our radio could only pick up one station.

Locals pronounce the county name as Lafate.

The radio station played country western music and told jokes, but never did say where they were broadcasting from. I recon they figure if you can hear them, you know where they are.

One guy says, “Shot my dog yesterday”
“Was he mad”?
“He sure weren’t too happy about it”.

As we drove over there, we passed through one small town where we saw a bunch of people standing around a shade tree beside the road. Getting closer we read the sign announcing it was a site for swine flue shots being given in the open air clinic.

We’d never been to Lafayette Blue Springs before; we’d reserved our cabin back in March or April, so in this rural area we expected to see a cabin like this:

But that was not our cabin; that’s an old cracker house beside the road. It looks a lot like the homeplace—the house where my grandparents lived.

On arriving in the state park, we found that our cabin to looks like this:

It’s built up on stilts because of the nearby Suwannee River’s frequent flooding. (Stephen Foster misspelled the name in his famous song). Ginny and I really rough it when we go camping. Here are three photos of the cabin’s interior

Hunting season opens in November, so a car dealer advertising on the radio offered this incentive—This month, if you buy a pickup truck from him and go hunting and shoot a deer, then tie it on the hood and bring it by the dealer so he can take a picture of it, then he will pay a taxidermist to mount your deer head so you can hang it on your wall at home.

If the big auto makers in Detroit offered buyers that kind of incentive, they would not need government bail out money.

Ginny and I did not go hunting, but we did swim in LafayetteBlue Spring, one of Florida’s first magnitude springs. Because the water flows from underground caverns at a constant temperature of 72 degrees year round, and because the air temperature was only a little below that, November swimming in Florida is a joy.

Here is a photo of a water nymph posed to dive from a limestone outcropping above one spring pool:

She chickened out.

Here is a photo of me wearing my form-fitting Senior Citizen Speedo on that same outcropping:

Hey, it fits my form.

Blue Springs flow directly into the Suwannee through a series of pools. In places, the spring run undercuts the limestone forming a natural stone bridge. Here’s a photo of my beautiful Ginny standing on such a natural bridge:

A stone ridge at the mouth of the spring run creates boiling rapids:

The rapids foam. The spring’s current flows swiftly into the Suwannee. The rocks are slippery. Be careful or… Never mind.

The radio announcer told about this guy who takes his wife deer hunting for the first time.

They are still-hunting so he sets her up in one spot while he climbs a tree-stand a few hundred yards away. BOOM. He hears a shot and thinks his wife has bagged one.

He goes over to find her holding her rifle on this man with his hands in the air.

“What’s going on”?

Irate, she said, “This guy wants to steal my deer”.

The guy said, “Lady, you can have it, just let me get my saddle off first”.

God willing, I hope to write more about our wonderful anniversary adventures, relay more radio jokes, talk about spiritual implications, and post more photos tomorrow and Wednesday.

Stay tuned to this station.