Today was a driving day. It was time to return to Jacksonville to spend the rest of the week with Sam. We woke up, checked out of the hotel and headed back north.
In between Jacksonville and Orlando is a quiet little
beachfront town called New Smyrna. It’s located
just south of the more famous Daytona Beach and situated almost exactly halfway between our two points of destination. And what – you might be wondering – is in New
Smyrna that makes it remotely interesting to the Hicks family?
New Smyrna happens to be the location of the Bob Ross ArtWorkshop and Gallery. It was
opened by The Man Himself in 1992 and it has a large collection of Bob’s original paintings. You can take classes at the property to learn to paint in the Bob Ross style.
The Hicks’ – all four of us – are big Bob Ross fans. So we could not. Could. Not. Get that close to New Smyrna and
not go check it out.
We took a stroll around the outside of the room where the
paintings were hung. There were several
on the wall I remember seeing on the show.
We bought a magazine all about Bob Ross to take home to Ross. We chatted with the young man running the
place – he was appropriately friendly and probably gets this kind of drop-in a
lot. He gave us some tips for the best
place to view the ocean while we were in town.
And we left. All in all we were there about 10-15 minutes.
We were really glad we didn’t make a special trip just to visit the studio. But it was a nice break in our drive back to Orlando. We were also like 4 minutes from the Atlantic Ocean. So we popped over and took a look.
It was cold and windy. We did observe how the locals ‘do’ public beach. It’s similar to how the northern folks ‘do’ ice fishing. They drive on out there, park and set up shop out of the backs of their vehicles. That, I can get behind. After taking a few quick pictures and looking around – we walked back to the car and our venture back to Jacksonville. We also decided that the two of us are not the beach people in our family. We'll let Ross and Sam take that honor and wear it with pride. Isaac and I will stay in the hotel and keep the sand from off of our feet and out of our shoes. Unless of course the point of the day is to go to the beach. In which case, I will come properly prepared with a book.
In the car, we had decided to try out Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. Isaac was enjoying it, “This is interesting - it’s about trends,” he said. The book discusses the anatomy of what makes a trend happen. What is the point where something that starts small 'tips' and becomes something that is huge. As an initial example, he talks about the Hush Puppy shoes comeback in the mid 1990s. He boils his theory down to the three necessary ingredients or agents for change. Interestingly enough – Malcolm compares this phenomena of the 'tipping point' with how epidemics occur. One of his examples was the Spanish Flu pandemic. Talk about sensing a ‘trend.’ This is a perfect example of what I love about life – coincidence, chance, God Winks, serendipity - whatever you want to label it. It’s fascinating how things sometimes just all work together in chorus.
I love it
when it happens.
We got to Sam’s around noon and woke him up again. We told him we would go check into our
hotel and be back to give him a little time to adjust. When we returned, we all piled in Sam’s truck
and went to the grocery store to load him up.
I shopped for the ingredients for Bounty Rice which I promised I would
make the boys for dinner the next evening.
Then it was back to the hotel for a quiet evening, movies
and sleep.
