Pensacola Beach

Day three after class, it was time to explore the other direction. I went out to Fort Pickens (don't worry, it was closed too) and then I drove to the other end until I encountered a road closure sign. This stretch of sand is collectively called Pensacola Beach.

 Once again, herons guard the beach.

 And another.

And even a third one on the same beach.

And a snowy egret for variety. It was eating a fish.

It was a very long stretch of beach with lots of seashells.

Finally, it was getting dark, so it was time to end the day in proper fashion before going back to base to get ready for class the next day.

The pork gyro was very good. I tried the chicken one a couple of days later, and it was good but not even close to the same level of enjoyment as the first one.

Exploring Alabama's Gulf Coast (Perdido Key, Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, and Fort Morgan)

After the first day of class, it was time to begin exploring. I drove west from the base and down through Perdido Key, where apparently a lot of Navy pilots live. Nice, expensive strip of sand with a lot of houses built to withstand high water and hurricanes.

Among these was a junky-looking 2,000-sq-ft home that was being sold for a paltry $630,000 (not the one pictured above).

 Most of the way down Perdido Key, I crossed into Alabama. That's a first!

After passing through Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, the road ended at Fort Morgan, which historically guarded the entrance to Mobile Bay. The fort was closed because it was after 5pm, so this is what was at the end of the road.

I had forgotten that the Gulf Coast is a major oil and natural gas drilling area, and there were dozens of oil platforms off the coast and in the bay itself.

 Just to the right of those platforms is Dauphin Island, a popular vacation spot.

 

There were several large, dead fish on the beach.

 And hundreds of jellyfish everywhere.

 

Herons seem to be on patrol on every beach around here. 

 

I chatted with a local fisherman. He said people typically catch redfish, snapper, or whatever happens to get caught.

 

Lieutenant Mosier goes to Pensacola

So, I'm active-duty Navy again. This sure surprised a lot of my friends and family, as well as myself. My new job: Naval Officer Recruiter for the Boise region, and head of the Boise Navy Recruiting division (Boise, Meridian, Nampa, and Twin Falls offices). After spending the first few weeks getting oriented and not doing much in the way of recruiting due to lack of access to the required web-based tools and programs, my first assignment was three weeks in Pensacola, Florida, to attend the Navy's officer recruiting course.

 

I tried to get Emily and the kids to come along, but she said something about kids, calendar commitments, way too much travel, etc. Well, someone had to be responsible, so I took it upon myself to go to Pensacola alone.

It suddenly dawned on me several years ago that I was afraid of flying. I still do it, which is a good thing.

When I arrived at Naval Air Station Pensacola, I found a promising spot to enjoy my Panda Express dinner.

Pensacola is in the extreme western corner of the Florida Panhandle, 25 minutes from Alabama. It is bounded by several barrier islands and "keys." It's a great spot for a vacation naval station.

Gardening 2017: September (last of the harvest)

And the harvest kept coming.

I planted a hundred or more tomatillo seeds, fearing that they might not come up, as I had no experience growing them. Well, I soon had a tomatillo forest, and I was only able to pick a couple hundred of the fruit. There were many hundreds. Interestingly, due to the density of the tomatillo plants, all of the fruit came out miniature, each maybe the size of a garbanzo bean on average.

I ventured to make tomatillo-pineapple salsa, and it turned out so well.
That was a first (both the salsa and the wellness). Gardens are so motivating.

Plenty of beets and carrots. These carrots actually tasted like carrots, contrary to the ones we grew in Virginia (which tasted like wood). The ground is so hard and clay here that the beets didn't push down into the soil and swell into round beets. Instead, they pushed down just enough to get water, and their tops swelled at ground level, so they all came out looking oblong and distorted. They were still very tasty, though.  

We harvested a few canteloupes, but they didn't taste very good. This one was over-ripe.

We finally had to pick the watermelons, since several of them had stopped developing, and we were getting into the cold season when they would perish anyway. If this one had a couple of weeks longer, it would have been perfect.

One of the personal-sized melons turned out triangular and wasn't growing, so we finally picked it to investigate.

It must have interbred with the pumpkins, and the inside looked and smelled like a pumpkin. We did not taste it.

We had so much fun experimenting with our garden this year, and we can't wait to see what adventures the next season will bring.

Under-the-window Garden

When we moved in, I knew that I wanted a flower bed under our dining room window, but we didn't have time to dig the bed out in the fall, so Kelson planted the bulbs in the middle of the grass. Come summer, I hacked out all of the grass around the plants we had put there. Lamest job ever, considering that our yard has enough rocks to open our own gravel pit. The end result was a beautiful flower garden, though, and it was worth all of the work.

Cute miniature tulips that are hot pink with dark blue centers. 

Early summer plant babies

When they built our house, they demolished a landscaping island in the backyard. We found the pink rosebush somehow still growing in the middle of the yard even after being bulldozed. It is now thriving in the flower garden.

One of Sarah's garden jobs is deadheading. She loves cutting off all of the dead flowers. She might get some live ones occasionally, but that's okay.

Million bells (which looked amazing!), cinquefoil, coreopsis, and wallflowers. We bought a huge load of landscaping rocks and flagstones at a yard sale, which gave me lots of interesting things to put in my garden.

Everything getting bigger! Some of the things you see here are petunias, lupine, marigolds, daylilies, Mexican shell flowers, asters, verbena, and black-eyed susans.

Like in the center garden, we had no idea what half of the things were coming up in this garden. One of the things we were waiting for was a Chinese lantern flower. When this came up, we thought it was it and let it keep growing. It turned into this, which is definitely not a Chinese lantern. It was 3 feet tall with unattractive yellow flowers when we finally pulled it out. I have no idea what it was. Maybe a weed.

lupine

daylilies

Mexican shell flowers

strawflowers

We found these weird bugs on the strawflowers - like a miniature praying mantis. They were eating the little bees that were pollinating the flowers. We didn't like them.

Then we found two of these - big praying mantises. They appeared in September. They were too intriguing to look away from. We saw them catch bees and butterflies. We thought Sarah would freak out, but she found it totally interesting and always wanted to go look for the mantises, which hung out in this plant for a few weeks.