Old Florida

If your view of Florida is Orlando Airport, International Drive and Mickey Mouse then you have missed out on a whole lot of Florida.  There are numerous State Parks and a phenomenal amount of wildlife - I'll blog the wildlife photos another day.

As you drive through towns in Florida you will see notices about the Florida Heritage districts and we stayed in or visited several.

We stayed in this 1905 house: White Springs B&B

And this was the church across the road

We stayed in this beautiful house in Quincy: McFarlin House which was built in 1895.

This is the house opposite.

We also stayed at the Port Inn rebuilt in 1948 after the original 1909 inn burned down.

We visited Tallahassee where we toured the Knott House Museum.  This house was built in 1843 by George Proctor, a free black man, and the house later became home to Florida's first black physician.

This was the house next door.

We visited the Old Capitol building built in 1845 and remondelled in 1902 which now houses an excellent museum of the history of Florida.

The new Capitol Building is a hideous 22 storey 1970s structure.  However you are allowed to go to the top to look out over Tallahassee.  And the foyer wasn't too bad!

Micanopy was a funny little place with 2 cafes and several antiques shops and not a lot else going for it!

We visited historic Downtown Pensacloa on a Sunday morning which meant we got it totally to ourselves.  The downside was that neither museum opens on a Sunday!

Wakulla Lodge in Wakulla Springs State Park turned out to be a 1930s gem.  Sadly we didn't look it up on the internet to see if we could stay there because in my mind it was going to be a hostel rather than a hotel.  How wrong was I when we actually saw it!  A beautiful hotel which wasn't much dearer than the Best Western we actually stayed in 10 minutes away.

Our favourite bit of Old Florida was Cedar Key.

 

And our final visit to a bit of Old Florida was the Gamble Plantation State Park in Ellenton.

Come back soon to see photos of Florida wildlife including Pelicans, Egrets and Alligators.

Number Crunching

Every month on Julie Kirk's blog she sums up the month in My Month in Numbers.  I love reading it but it isn't something I have wanted to take on.  But I did think it would be a useful way to sum up my recent trip to Florida.

Hopefully most of my readers didn't know that I was away.   As we were away for much longer than usual we didn't want to advertise that we had left the house empty so I couldn't even share what I was up to in my status on Facebook.  Boo hoo!  So on to ....

My Florida Trip in Numbers

We were away for 17 days.  We left on November 14th from Manchester and left Orlando on November 30th.

We stayed in 6 hotels, 2 motels including this one where we were the only guests!,

River Inn Motel at Steinhatchee

 2 B&Bs

McFarlin House B&B, Quincy

 and 4 nights with Kenny & Betsy.

We went on 3 boat trips.  The best one was at Cedar Key. A brash American guy brought his large golden labrador and his excitable black labrador on the trip which was a bit irrating to start with.

 
However the black labrador attracted the dolphins.

 
We visited 15 State Parks including the Florida Caverns State Park.

The Suwannee River made famous by the Stephen Foster song.

'The Cathedral' in the Florida Caverns

We were 2 of the 44 people who sat down to Thanksgiving dinner at Chassahowitzka River Campground.  (We didn't camp!  We stayed at the Holiday Inn Express!)   There were 2 deepfried turkeys and lots of other yummy food.

I took 1311 photos.  There were more but some I deleted whilst still on the memory card!

Of these there were 99 taken of Kenny's extended family and Betsy's extended family.

Kenny's family

There are numerous photos of birds and plants including far too many of Spanish Moss,  plus pelicans, egrets, herons and other birds and several alligators.

Photos of several white sandy beaches which I shall probably only be able to identify by studying the map for which day I took them.

Plus a lot of sunset photos.

The highest temperature while we were in Florida was 79 degrees and the lowest was around 54 degrees.  The first two days of our holiday were very cool and the skies were grey.  Most of the photos look like they were taken in the UK!

I only made 2 visits to Michaels and 1 visit to Joanne's and I only spent, a rather restrained, 92.27dollars.  And apparently saved $29.29

Altogether we drove 2189 miles around Florida, starting and finishing at Orlando Airport.  We travelled to Mount Dora, White Springs, Tallahassee, Pensacola, Cedar Key, Crystal River, Gulfport, Venice & Sarasota, across Florida to Lake Kissimmee and on to Palm Bay and Melbourne.

We ate out for most of the trip and this included  12 hotel or cafe breakfasts at which I usually ate waffles or pancakes, 10 cafe lunches including this one:

Palm Salad - Iceberg lettuce, nuts, peaches, pineapple and peanut butter icecream

10 restaurant dinners, 1 Thanksgiving dinner and 1 Christmas dinner.

And I am pleased to say that I put on 0 pounds.

Finishing my journal

I am thrilled.  I have 15 double sided pages of art journaling.  Some pages I really love and some I'm not so fond of but know that I can go back and do something with them.

If you've been making your journal in a similar way to me then you will have 2 sheets of randomly coloured and stamped backing paper.

Here are mine:

To make the covers of my journal I cut two pieces of card one eighth of an inch larger than the pages.

Then on one side of each card I put doublesided tape around the edges and down the middle as in the card on the left.   I removed the backing tape and then using a glue stick went over the whole card including the tape.  This is another of Dyan Reaveley's amazing tips.  It means if you don't put the paper on quite right you can remove it because the glue from the glue stick puts a slight barrier between the tape and the paper. 

I cut the first piece of backing paper in half and smooth each piece onto the taped and glued card.  I gave it a little time to dry and then cut off all the excess paper.

I turned the card over and did the same on the back with the second piece of backing paper.

At this point if you have any bits of the paper that isn't covered sufficiently you can add extra inks or paint.   Then ink around the edges to colour the card.  You could do this before you stick the paper down if you wish.

Now you need to decide which sides of your cards are going to be the outside of your journal.  I decided that those in the first photograph will be mine.  I rather like those 3 hearts.

Get a narrow strip of paper about an inch wide and the same length as the height of your pages.   With a ruler I worked out where to punch the holes for the book rings and punched them out of the strip.  This acts as a template for the covers and the pages.  The number of book rings needed depends on the size of your book.  I wondered about putting 5 in this journal but in the end settled on 4.

Rather than evenly space the four across the whole length, I put two closer together top and bottom.

I punched the holes in the pages and then placed the template on the back cover aligning it so that there was an even space at each end.  Remember I cut my cover slightly larger than my pages.  Then I used the back cover as the template for punching the holes in the front cover.

Do you remember these?   These are the leaves I die cut and used as a mask on November 17th.  I stamped with a script stamp.  I decided they wouldn't really show up on the cover of my journal.

So I sprayed them with gold mica ink and orange mica ink.  (These inks are no longer produced so please don't ask what make they are.  Thanks)

Then I had a rummage (that's a technical term by the way!) in my stash and found some bits and pieces of papers and things and moved them around until I was happy with it.  I inked the edges of the torn papers with Distress Ink.

You're probably wondering about that piece of cotton I used to mop up the paint and inks.  Well as you can see it matches the covers beautifully.

Actually, I could have ironed the piece of cotton and used it to cover the card for the covers.  If you do that I suggest you put a piece of parchment paper between the cloth and the iron to prevent messing up your iron.

What I decided to do was rip up the cotton to make ribbons to tie to the book rings.  You could use ordinary ribbon if you prefer.  And you could add charms or beads to the ribbon.

And a close up.

I am so pleased with my finished journal.  I hope my blog posts walking through the making of my journal has been helpful to you.

Please share your finished journal through the Linky on the Attitude of Gratitude blog.

It's been a pleasure to spend the last 31 days with you.

Thank you
Bernice