Astronomy and Space, Florida, Fulltime RVing

2019 Spring and Summer Plans

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In our last post, we jumped ahead to what we were planning for in September and October of this year with our trip to the United Kingdom and Ireland.  After quite a bit of trip routing, we are ready to reveal our spring and summer plans!

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Like these pelicans along the shore, we will soon line up with everyone else and fly northward.  Once we get to Jacksonville, we are turning westward for a journey to the Grand Canyon and the surrounding area.  It will be a very busy slate. Look for a spring full of posts about that trip.  We have three months before we have to be back in Michigan to start our volunteer gigs at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.  We will be there for two months before heading overseas for a month.  And after that???

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Well, the fact that I installed a flagpole sleeve in the ground at our site in Florida, I guess that’s a pretty good indication of where we will be next winter!  We’ve really come to love it here.  Good friends, good weather and…

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…rocket launches!  This particular launch was the Crew Dragon demonstration mission that SpaceX sent to the International Space Station last week.  The capsule safely returned on Friday about 200 miles off the coast.  Future splashdowns will be within 25 miles of shore, so we should be able to get some photos of them parachuting down.

And an update on our genealogy work:  Diana is finding a plethora of information on her roots that will ensure that we have plenty of places to visit when we get overseas.  She has been able to go way, way back in her lineage.  On my search, I’m currently working between my sixth and tenth great grandparents on my dad’s side.  To let you know how involved that is, every one of us have 256 sixth great-grandparents.  By the time you get to your tenth great-grandparents, that number balloons to 4096 people!  Thanks to the Catholic church records in Canada, there is a record of most every one of mine.  And I know that there are several hints waiting to take me beyond that level.  Time will tell what I find on my mom’s German side.

We’ve also found time to have fun with our friends in the area.

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We checked out the St Katherine’s Greek Festival one day with Fred and Bonnie.  It was fun to see the dancers doing traditional Greek dances in their costumes.

We also met our friends Jim and Sue, who were down from Alton, Illinois to see their son Jake pitch for Fontbonne University.

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He didn’t end up pitching that afternoon, but he did start today.  He got the win, and the team is 10-0 on the year so far.

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The four of us rented a nice home on Airbnb which worked out extremely well.  What a great time!

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So as our time winds down for the year in Melbourne Beach, be sure to keep an eye out for our upcoming posts as we head west.  Until next time, safe and happy travels to all!

 

 

 

27 thoughts on “2019 Spring and Summer Plans”

    1. Not only will I bring my hammer, I’ll bring a nail to pound in, Jim! On the launch: we will have to get you guys out to see one in the coming years. Really fun to watch.

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  4. Looks like you will have a few months on the move! I admit to feeling a pang when I read about everyone traveling familiar routes to places we’ve been. Learning new things is hard. 🙂

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  6. Nice to have a winter spot to call home! On the German side we got lucky with a Lutheran church. We knew the home town and a cousin found the baptismal records. The graves from the 1700’s were long gone as they dug them up and put them in bone piles to make space – reportedly. I did not trust the ship records for an indication of what town they were from as we discovered there were common ports of departure used, which later mistakenly became what others thought were their home towns. Germany not being a country that long ago does not help. If, by change, they came over from Germany just prior to the revolutionary war or during that time, they could also be in a book that’s not that hard to find.

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      2. Best thing to do is join Ancestry.com, Beth. I will say that if you have your roots in the South, you might run into what is referred to as “burned counties”…where the courthouses (and records) were burned during the Civil War. We spoke with folks in Williamsburg who clued us in on that. If that’s the case, it is tough to jump back to Europe without those links. Doing the Ancestry DNA test will help you zero in on the areas your families are from, but plain old Ancestry is where you actually find the people.

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  9. So excited you’re coming west for a bit but bummed we’ll probably miss you! We will be in the Sedona area in early April….so maybe? Love that launch shot – great timing. I’d say a permanent flagpole is a definite sign of returning. It’s sure a beautiful area.

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