More From My Florida Journal

Hi everyone. Happy middle of the week to you. 

I thought today for Valerie's Anything Goes challenge at Art Journal Journey I would share a few more pages from my Florida travel  journal. My theme today is nature because when I travel I always try to find a few places (or maybe more than a few) where I can enjoy the natural world and not the man made one.

I'll start with this mangrove tree page I made. I added some info that I picked up at a National Park visitors center.

And my bird pages are also made with some info I picked up at a National Park visitor's center as well as my old college bird book that I am now chopping up. It's painful in some ways to cut it apart, but the info is really outdated because some common bird names and  many of the bird ranges have changed in the decades since I was in college. (Plus I have a couple of newer ones with actual photographs as well as drawings so I don't need this older one.)

One place we visited south of St. Petersburg was DeSoto National Memorial. We planned to walk after we watched a bit of living history, but the wind that day was brutal. You'd have thought we were back in New Hampshire- smile.

We ended our Florida roadtrip in Fort Meyers on the Gulf Coast. The shells on this next page really aren't appropriate because when we went to walk the  beach we became  distracted by all the hurricane  damage there still was. Hurricane Ian hit Fort Meyers practically dead on last September. I've never been to a site of a major disaster before, and it truly was mind blowing, even after 4 months.

I added the shells anyway because I liked them on my page. 

I cut this SWFL (southwest Florida) image you see on the next page out of one of those freebie maps you can pick up when you visit tourist areas. I wasn't sure how to show the all the hurricane damage on a page in my journal, but I think the fact that so many people have pulled together to make a difference is what is really important. 

And that's my art for today. It's turning into a busy week on  my end, and although some things on the calendar are just appointments,  at least I'm not sitting home just watching  the piles of snow slowly melt. Smile. 

I hope you're having a lovely week too.