Out and About

We hope everyone enjoys their Memorial Day Weekend and please take time to remember the reason for the holiday – it is about much more than a day off from work. It is a day to remember those who died in active military service.

I’ve been out to the pier at least three times in the previous two weeks. After checking in with a hostess at Windjammers, I pay the required $1 to walk the pier while we wait for a table. Where else can you see the variety of marine life in less than an hour while waiting for a table at one of your favorite restaurants?  One such visit we were able to see pelicans, herons, an abundance of sea turtles, a school of rays, not to mention the fish that the anglers were pulling up. If you see a female criss-crossing the pier every few feet all the way up the pier and back and looking over the edge for extended amounts of time with a camera in her hands – that is probably me. And, if you see a male spotter, that is probably my husband. He also likes to talk to people about the wildlife – because he is an expert by osmosis and training. His dad was a high school science teacher – and he majored in geology – which has nothing to do with animals except for finding their skeletal remains in rocks. He did find an intact dinosaur fossil once while he was training in New Mexico. Let’s just say that when he was deployed, mice were on my grocery list because he accidently ran over a gray rat snake in the Publix parking lot and brought it home to nurse it back to health before he released it into the wild – far away from Publix. There was a more recent time we were at Target in Mary Esther and a snake had gotten into the outside utility room. The workers were freaking out and he went in there, picked it up and took it to a wooded area nearby to let it go. He grew up around snakes and they are just another creature to him. I don’t know how many times we have suddenly come to a dead stop in the middle of the road while he waited on a snake to get out of the way – or got out to see what kind of snake didn’t get out of the way fast enough. I got way off track there. I’m far away from my original topic. Regardless, pay $1 and go walk the pier in the evenings and enjoy all the wildlife and the anglers catching fish. I take hundreds of photos and then we use them later in our visitor guide which will be at distribution locations around Navarre by the time you receive this paper. A sure bet is to pick it up at the Pier, or the Navarre Beach Area Chamber of Commerce or the Tourism Development Office next to Navarre Park. We appreciate all the advertisers who participated and a special shoutout to Jeff Waldorff who provided our cover art this year. We are very blessed to have very talented photographers in Navarre. And, I must give a shoutout to God for giving us such a beautiful place to practice our photography and for the privilege of living here.

Last but not least, Saturday is the 19th birthday of our first edition. We have been around to record every graduating class of Navarre High School and all the momentous occasions and news in between. We will be 20 in 2020 – it is just fun to say – and type.

Quote of the Week: Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. Sir Winston Churchill, British politician (1874 – 1965)