St. Augustine, Florida

We've decided to stay. Roadtrip over.



No. I'm just kidding. But the thought did cross our mind. St. Augustine is an awesome place. The pace of life is just a little different than any place we've traveled to yet. I don't know if it's just a winter thing but life runs slower here. It's not in overdrive 24/7 like so many other places. I've only ever been to the Disney World/Orlando section of Florida before and that is definitely an overdrive kind of place. It's a perpetually sticky, colorful, loud, kids-in-tow type of town. But here....oh, here is not like that. Here it is calm, almost muted. The waves lull us to sleep each night. And each morning we're greeted with a sunrise (yes, we've actually seen it. Twice! It's much easier to see it when it comes into your room and you can fall back asleep after you've seen what you want to see.) People are pleasant and helpful. And as an added bonus, there were people to visit here!

We got to hang out with Mary a couple times while were here. She took us out to dinner at two of her favorite restaurants here and we learned a lot about one another. Mary is quite a woman. She is one of the most intelligent women I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. She uses words such as 'hellacious' with remarkable ease. We so enjoyed her company and hearing of her own adventures and travels. She told us that she went deep sea fishing and caught a 325 lb. Marlin! She's been to a number of the places that we want to go still and it's exciting to hear her stories of them. She's so encouraging to. Full of wonderful advice and words to live by. She is such an accomplished woman who has done so much for other people. I find her very admirable. I think I would have very much enjoyed having her as a professor were she still teaching.

We also had the opportunity to look one of Josh's old high school friends up. Joey used to live in California but his job moved him here to St. Augustine about a year ago and so we met up with him and caught up on life. Joey is an airplane engineer (I'm sure his exact title is something way more intense and lengthy but I don't remember anymore) and works for the Department of Defense. In his off time, he likes to race. We had plans to go see him race but the event got moved and so we didn't get to. Joey races in an entirely different way than I have ever heard. He does Autocross. In my rather limited understanding, it's like a giant obstacle course where it's more about navigating turns and using techniques in a lower gear to be the fastest one to complete the course. He told us it's rare for him to ever get beyond second gear! This is crazy to me because I'm a drag racer at heart and speed is the best in my book. But autocross does look fun too.

The other thing we did while here was go surfing!!!! We got ourselves some surf lessons from Andrew who just moved back from the gnarly waves of California. He is in the true fashion of surf-dom with his long curly locks and tanned physique.  He used to do a lot of surfing with the Wounded Warriors program out in Cali and so he was a great teacher for both Josh and myself.  We had so much fun! I can't even explain how much fun it is. The water is so deceptively powerful and vast. It's unnerving how far you can be pushed by a wave or drift out into the ocean without even realizing it.

Pit Surf Shop: the site of our surf lessons and some new Sanuks :)

Surf's up!

Action shot of Josh!

Closer action shot

We are not really looking forward to leaving tomorrow. But, it has to be done or we'll never make it the rest of the way out West. So, off to New Orleans we go. 

Nashville, Tennessee (Yee-Haw)

 We made it to Nashville on Wednesday around 2pm and went to the Country Music Hall of Fame. It was a lot of fun to see country music through the ages. The old stuff interested me the most. They have stuff from the 20's on up; the history behind the music and all the different influences that the decades and people had on it. And we learned that the term 'hillbilly' didn't always have negative connotations to it. It used to refer to a type of musician and was used with a positive meaning.

This would be Elvis' car (or I should say, one of them). He was ahead of his time.  A TV in the back, an ice maker (really works!), an intercom system to communicate with his driver when the privacy glass is up. Here's the best part: the paint is made of crushed diamonds and fish scales. In case you're wondering, yes, it is shiny. He may have sung about a pink Cadillac, but he drove around in a gold-plated one. And a side note, his wife, Priscilla bought him a grand piano for their first wedding anniversary and commissioned someone in Europe to plate it in 24-carat gold. (yuck).

The Whomper. This guitar/banjo is made out of a bass drum. Really wanted  see how it sounded. But it's behind glass, alas... 

Platinum records

Clearly a snazzy fashion choice. Stacy and Clinton would approve.

One of Reba McIntyre's get-ups. This lady was my dad's all time fave. In fact, the first book I can remember him reading the whole way through was her autobiography. And if you look through old family photos, he can be seen wearing a T-shirt with her face on it for a number of years. I think it's in the rag bucket now...

Marty Robbins! I LOVE his music! My mom and I used to jam (okay, you really don't jam to 50's country. I realize this.) to his music on our mini roadtrips together. We had his CD that was converted from an old 45. And now she listens to him on Pandora. Oh, technology...

Downtown Nashville. In the Honkytonk District?

This is where we ate dinner. A man in stilts greeted us.

He made us hats! Mine is a shark fin and Josh's is a viking hat! The food was pretty awesome. I had a drink called 5 o'clock Somewhere. It came with its own souvenir glass. I also learned that I've been singing the words to Margaritaville all wrong for, well, forever actually. Apparently Jimmy is not looking for a large shaker and salt. He is looking for his lost shaker of salt. I assumed that he wanted to make a large margarita and rim it with salt. This is not the case. And we tried fried green tomatoes for the first time. They're actually pretty darn delicious. Of course, i think that any American can attest to the fact that if you dip something in ooey-gooey batter and drop it in a piping hot vat of oil until it's crispy, just about anything is good.

Just call him Thor! Man on Stilts made Josh a sword on our way out.  Note Stilt Man's legs in the left of the picture!

Nashville was fun. We enjoyed the city and the accents quite a bit. The hills....not so much.  We didn't stay long though. After dinner, we hopped back in the car and drove to Calhoun, Georgia. And yesterday, we woke up and drove another 9 or so hours until we hit Florida. We are now in St. Augustine, FL and loving every minute of this weather. We have two different people to visit in this lovely town. And I have a feeling that we might stay a little longer here than we originally planned. This weather is seriously killer. We went to the beach today to just soak up the sunshine. It's such a mood booster and we needed it after the pace we've been keeping on the drive. By the end of day four, we'd already accumulated over 1500 miles. So a few hours to lay in some sand was good. Now tomorrow, we're heading down the road to visit with Mary, a former customer of my parents' and member of our church. She has pets. I'm excited.

On the Road Again!

It's been exactly one month since we've been on the road! We didn't plan it that way. Our original plan was to leave much sooner but life got in the way. Holidays, birthdays, surgeries, house stuff. You name it. But we finally left. We aren't even the least bit disappointed to have stuck around though. We had such a good time being at home for the last month. Got to spend some quality time with our families, which was fantastic. And we had our first married Christmas in our home together too. Some of our highlights from the holidays...

My big courageous brother, who despite having a herniated disc, managed to have a smiling face for his family at Christmas. He had surgery this week to correct it which was very successful.

My beautiful parents opening up their presents on Christmas morning. They got hit hard this year (in a good way, of course). They got a gorgeous family photo on canvas and all their home videos converted to DVD from VHS.

My lovely sister-in-law. This picture is awesome. A true 'point and laugh' caught in the act! My mom got us each these little potato pistols for Christmas. You stick them in a potato and out comes this little pellet. You squeeze the trigger and the pellet is propelled into the air and smacks your target. It was awesome. It also made our Christmas dinner over and hour late. But it was well worth it. Might be a new tradition at the Ressler house...

I love this picture. This is one of those moments of pure joy that's evident all the way to the eyes. So much joy that the facial muscles have difficulty smiling big enough. I think he just shot me with the potato gun.

Our first Christmas tree. In true Charlie Brown fashion.

We celebrated New Years with my bro and sis. We had poppers.  So much confetti...

We went down to Rockville for Juliann's birthday to go climbing at Carderock. It was such a great day!

Meet Josh's brother, John. This is a classic John pose :)

Josh took fun pictures this day. He set up the toproping site and anchors for us to climb and then worked on his photography skills. He has a Brownie camera from the 20's that he got film for and practiced using that. 

And then just this weekend, we got to see one of our favorite kids get dedicated at church :) 

And now we are on the road again. We drove roughly 550 miles today. We left yesterday afternoon for Josh's parents' house to drop off a few things and hang out for a little. Then drove for as long as we were awake enough to. Which wasn't far. Then today we started out from Gainesville, VA and are currently somewhere just past Knoxville, TN. The states got longer. So did the accents. We are officially in the South. We encountered everything from closed roads due to ice, torrential rainstorms, beer sold at gas stations to 60 degree weather! It's been and odd sort of travel day.  We took a slightly scenic route to drive part of Skyline Drive in Shenendoah State Park.

View from one of the overlooks along Skyline Drive. This is the Shenendoah Valley. Very pretty.

The thermometer reads 60 degrees! Yeah baby!

We took some time last night to plan out the rest of our route because we only have a short time to be gone for this leg of our journey. We were sad to discover that we just don't have the time to make it the whole way out west. No California, Oregon or Washington for us :(  But we WILL see those states at some point. Maybe in the Fall...We have our work cut out for us for our route. I think we'll probably sleep for a week when we get back. But here we go with part two!