We took a week off, beginning Sunday the eleventh through Sunday the eighteenth.
We live pretty intense lives for two geezers, both working full-time jobs which we regard as mission fields, hosting two house gatherings and participating in a third gathering--plus the rest of what is a hectic life for people of our age.
So, we planned a week's vacation. We vacated our home and hit the highway and travelled to the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina area.
All things considered, we had a good week.
Interestingly, there are people we know in that area. Our friend Matt, who lived with us for a while during the spring when he was between houses, moved to a town about 20 miles from Myrtle Beach and a woman from the church settled in that area a few years ago. We let both know that we'd be near them and met with them both two times during the week.
We spent the week with my oldest friend, Tom, whom I met at age five when we were in Beginners' Swimming Class. He now lives near Denver, Colorado and is married to Janice, a woman we adore, who dealt with breast cancer two years before Evelyn was diagnosed. Janice is a physician. She became a cancer mentor for Evelyn and made that difficult journey much easier for both Evelyn and me.
On the journey to and from, we listened to an audio version of Elizabeth George's novel, Believing the Lie. George is the author of the Inspector Lynley novels, which were featured on Masterpiece Mystery a few years back. This is a novel published after the end of the series and I've wanted to listen to it for several years. George writes in the style of P. D. James--tons of character development and not a lot of action,with, perhaps a little more humor than in James' novels. The problem with George's books is that they are very long. This book, in audio, is 22 1/2 hours long, not the longest I've ever listened to, but very challenging. We still haven't finished it. And, interestingly, about 70% of the way through it, are still not certain that Inspector Lynley is even investigating a crime.
The weather was pleasant for us every day we were in South Carolina and we loved the area.
We did a lot of the cliché touristy things during the week.
Among them, we found a nice used book store which had a large audio book section and had in stock the first book in Harlan Coben's, Myron Bolitar series. I already had three of the audio books in my library and while the first in the series, Deal Breaker, is not my favorite, it's certainly in the top ninety percentile of books I've "read." It was for sale at a very reasonable price and so I bought it.
We visited a huge garden. (Our friend Janice is an award-winning amateur photographer who specializes in flowers.) We saw more than our share of alligators and viewed the South Carolina flooding, which is draining very slowly. We hiked a bit of a State Park south of Myrtle Beach and visited an enterprise that is a cross between an outdoor shopping mall and an amusement park. We ate a variety of restaurants. Evelyn and I don't watch TV at home so, I caught up on some Law and Order reruns and Evelyn watched some episodes of her favorite HGTV programs, including House Hunters and the show featuring Chip and Joanna Gaines. And, of course, being tourists at the shore, we walked the boardwalks in Myrtle Beach and Murrell's Inlet. Neither is comparable to a New Jersey boardwalk.
Because the trip is so long, we returned in two days and spent the night on the way home in Virginia Beach, which we love and was not too far out of the way, and drove up the Delmarva peninsula, which is a more pleasant drive than the chaos of the roads around D. C..
My dad's 2006 Buick held up well and got over 30 mpg.
It was nice to go off to a quiet place and to get some rest.
Now, back to our mission fields.
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