By the numbers:

• One – One phone call from home – had to cut yesterday’s blog short.  A call from home put a temporary stop to our trip, and maybe a bigger stop.  One of our sons is in the hospital.  We spend last night and most of today trying to get a handle on the situation.  Options including abandoning our car here in Georgia and flying home.  However, after many hours of conversation with all family members. we have decided to continue our trip and monitor the situation as we go.  For now we can help more by being available to talk and explore options than if we were less available while flying back home.  If we dropped everything and started to drive back it would be 5 or 6 days to get back to the West Coast.  So, for today at least we have kept traveling, checking in both along the way and at every stop.  That may change tomorrow.
• 230 miles. From Jacksonville, Florida to Savannah, Georgia – 5392 miles for the trip.
• One new license plate spotted, Quebec.  In addition to 48 states and D.C. we now have seen 4 Canadian provinces.
• 3 National Parks today. – Cumberland Island National Seashore, Fort Frederica National Monument,  Fort Pulaski National Monument.  37 Parks and designated areas for the trip.
• 98 degrees.

The parks the last two days have been of two types.  One is of the National Preserve nature.  When you see these areas in there natural state, with all of the wonderous elements of creation living and thriving within their boundaries is makes me thankful, we live in a country which values our need to care for the planet sufficiently to protect these places.  It also makes one wonder at what it must have looked like along the whole East Coast before so much of it was developed to fit the needs of just one of God’s creatures – humans.

The other type is historical in nature.  This is the part of the country which was in active dispute during the height of the colonial powers trying to divide up the known world.  Fort Frederica was the southernmost fort of the English defending their claim to North America from the North and as far South as they could stretch.  Castillo De San Marcos was the northernmost fort of the Spanish trying to extend their claims as far north as possible.  Fort Matanzas was basically a fortified watch tower to protect the backwater approach to Castillo.  In between those two for a very brief time the French had Fort Caroline, where they had designs on wedging their way into the Americas between the other two powers.  That did not last long.

One thought for me was a reminder of how Florida fits into our early national history.  We all know that Florida was not one of the original colonies.  However, I did not have it clearly in my head how much later it was before Florida became a State. Before reading ahead take a guess as to which number of state Florida was when it entered the Union.

Florida was still a Spanish Colony until 1821.  All of the other Deep South states had entered the Union by 1819.  Arkansas and Michigan entered in 1836 and 1837.  Florida did not become a state until 1845, only 15 years before the Civil War, and was the 27th state.

One other thought for the day, as I find myself valuing family relationships to a great degree.  Part of a poem I heard from Garrison Keillor on the Writer’s Almanac, from “Reading Late” by Jesse Graves.

This book we write together keeps me turning pages deep into the night, re-reading chapters . . .

as the main characters grow steadily beyond our grasp, suspended from the hidden strings of this love story [and] develops with so much indirection and suspense, I can’t stand to put it down.

Tomorrow, we will stay in the Savannah area while we figure out the situation back home.