INDEPENDENCE DAY

The county has been readying for the Fourth of July for weeks. On the island, we will have our own celebration that naturally includes fireworks. But other things are going on, too. Here are some of the old cars showing up:

A close-up of the first one:

This little biplane takes passengers on rides over the area:

Not to forget the ships that have made our port so busy, here's a distant shot of three of them. You can barely see the tops over the trees:

And here is one going out (the one on the left) and one coming in (the one on the right);

Oh, how busy we are! Especially with the tourists already loaded up the streets and restaurants in preparation for the holiday!

TWO OF COLUMBUS' SHIPS

This weekend, replicas of the Nina and Pinta visited Brunswick. We rode over to view them and found it worth the ride and the cost of admission. The ships are manned (and womanned!) by volunteers. They spend eleven months a year traveling from port to port, educating students and others interested in history.

Both ships are black because in their day, ships were made waterproof by coating them with pine tar. And both are terribly small for traveling over the ocean! It was hard to believe twenty-four men traveled on the Pinta and twenty men on the Nina. It was hard to believe Christopher Columbus had the gumption to set sail in them, even if the Santa Maria was larger! (They don't have a replica of the original flagship. Reasons given were that its hull would be too deep to get into ports they travel to and also it was lost before Columbus got back to Europe.)

Here's a picture of the Pinta from the side:

And here she is from the back (looking at her from the Nina):

And moored right behind her was the smaller Nina. This is a front view:

Here's a photo of her front lines:

And here are a couple of her crew members:

If you get a chance to see them, you should go!

SHIPS IN THE NIGHT

I was sound asleep, dreaming of the sequel to my light mystery. (When I'm trying to figure out plots, I often dream of whatever I'm writing.) Right in the middle of the heroine peering over a mountainside to find a makeshift air strip down below, comes this HONK!

Let me tell you, I jumped six inches and woke up pronto! And looked wildly around to see what train was about to run over us.

It was a ship. We're a couple blocks up from the channel and can usually hear them pass. Last night it sounded like it was coming through our bedroom. The boy-cat must have heard it, too, because he came and crawled into bed with us.

Took me a while to get back to my work-in-progress, what with my pounding heart and the boy-cat licking my face to make sure I was all right. Or maybe he wanted me to get up and feed him.

I don't think my guy heard a thing.