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Sunrise to Sunset
How a beautiful idea turned into a very bad plan…
When I first met my husband in 2005 he told me that he had always wanted to see the sunrise on the East Coast of Florida and the sunset on the West Coast. It is such a captivating idea and Florida is the only state in the contiguous United States where you can accomplish seeing both celestial events over the coastline by virtue of a road trip in a single day.
Our dating relationship started with me in Texas and him in Jacksonville. He had been living in Florida since 1978 but not always in Jacksonville. Still, he was a long time resident of Jax, having moved there in 1982. I don’t know why his desire to make the drive from one side of the state to the other, following the sun, had never come into being. I guess life just kept getting in his way. Together we made plans towards putting a line through this item on his bucket list. We planned this excursion for one of my visits when we had not yet married.
At the time his daughter (now my step-daughter) was a freshman in high school and leaving her unsupervised for an entire day wasn’t a good idea. We told her what our plans were and that she could invite a friend to come with us. She ended up inviting two friends — sisters who are twins. Since the girls were teenagers and not wanting to get up early for the drive to the east coast beach (about thirty minutes away…
