2003 Dressage at Devon

Pre-Devon Diary

Thursday September 18, 2003: The Blow Drive

Just before my first night in the camper, JJ warned me not to be worried by the tapping noise on the walls. He told me that it was not someone knocking at the door. He mentioned something about bugs hitting the sides of the camper, but I didn't really understand what he was saying being so tired.

At 7 AM this morning, I heard a rhythmical thudding against the back wall of Mary's luxurious camper. First I thought it were acorns falling of the trees, but the thudding noise was distinctively different. I got up to take a look at it and what I saw was a beautiful red bird sitting 20 centimeters away from the window. It suddenly attacked the window, ricocheting back into the bushes. However, the bird repeated this kamikaze maneuver every seven seconds.

When I went into the house and told JJ about this bird, he said that it was a cardinal defending his territory. He was in fact attacking his mirror reflection in the window and persistently keeps doing this until he gets tired. What also surprises me so in Florida is that fauna and flora is triple the size of its European counterpart. Butterflies are as a big as a piece of bread, normal singing birds are the sizes of European magpies and mosquitoes sting as if they were snakes. Two nights in Florida and I have already become twice a casualty of war. A huge bite on my shoulder and a gigantic one on my calf deforming my body like ugly tattoos. "They feast on unspoiled European flesh," JJ ironically commented.

Today was Amazon-day for me. Mary and Horsesdaily have became affiliates of the mega company Amazon.com and I had to implement a link on the Horsesdaily and Dressagedaily templates to the megalosite. It took me almost two hours to research the possible links, two hours to get the button correctly onto the template, and two hours more changing the templates into a definite form and applying them to several pages on both sites. I felt completely brainwashed by this Amazon workday, mainly because I hadn't really got up from my chair the entire time and I also skipped lunch to get the job done.

I was so relieved that Mary detached me from the computer at 3 PM. "I love it when we can go out and play after a day of hard work," Mary said. "Today we are going to do one of my favorite things in the world, driving along the coastal route to St Augustine with the top down." I had been in St Augustine two years ago, but it's always refreshing and fun to take the drive and see one of the most beautiful villages in the U.S.

Totally dulled by today's computer work, I enjoyed the convertible ride to St Augustine. With a short stop at Daytona Beach to check out the waves Hurricane Isabelle has caused, we drove straight to St Augustine. It was windy outside and by sitting in the back seat of a Mustang Convertible, I get blow dried by this 60-mile "blow drive." But I needed the wind and my hair to whiplash me in the face so that I could activate my brain again and enjoy nature to the fullest. In St Augustine, we wanted to check out some of the shops near the Flagler Museum, but they were closed.

We continued our drive to Cap's Restaurant just outside St Augustine, where we got a table on the waterfront with a divine view of bayou/everglades country. I ordered a sesame seared tuna with wasabe and ginger for dinner and had a Margarita to drink. Mary, JJ and I talked about the latest happenings in our lives and we all agreed that Alaska is one of our mutual dream locations to go to in the future.

On our way home, we left a tequila sunset behind us and were greeted by yet another peculiar sound of Florida: yellow crickets loudly humming in the trees as if they were performing a Mexican sound wave. It strikes me much that not only nature is visibly different (bigger) in Florida, but that it also has a totally different scale of pleasures for the ear which make the state so unique.

by Astrid Appels