It has taken me four days to read through Big Creek and change many of the present tense verbs to past tense.  It has made me tense, mostly in the neck and shoulders. Of course I wasn’t at the computer the whole time during those four days.  I spent at least one whole day at Andy’s computer on the phone with tech support. And, there was some laundry to do.

We went to a nice Christmas party aboard Jerry and Marti’s boat, Monarch. And, one day we went to Bahia Honda State Park to walk on the beach in the afternoon.

I have read through the thing so many times that now I find it quite boring and not worthy of trying to turn into a book. I also don’t feel that I am making much, if any, progress. Each time I go through it making changes, I introduce errors. You might guess that I am a bit frustrated.

So, here are a few pictures from our beach walk; that was soothing. I had checked the tide tables the night before, so we got there a bit before low tide and had some beach to walk on. It was the first time this season that we were able to get to the north end of the beach. I was sad to see the two palm trees, subjects of many of my photos, lying across the beach.  All the recent storms have eroded much of the sand away and there are a number of other trees fallen over as well.

Andy spotted a Great Blue Heron around a point at the south end of the beach and motioned for me to stop.  We crept around the point, but did not see the heron until Andy saw its head poking up behind some bushes.

We moved down slowly down the beach until we could see the full heron and I took a few more pictures. It was a large specimen.

Since the tide was low, I was able to get a nice picture of these snails in the afternoon sunshine.  They are in the nooks and crannies of many of the limestone rocks on the beach.

 

I decided that Big Creek Journal was not very description and changed the title to:

Big Creek

A Closer Look at a National Park

as Told by Campground Hosts

in The Great Smoky Mountains National Park

 

Of course that will probably change again before all is said and done.