Grayton Beach State Park, Santa Rosa Beach, Florida
Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. ~ Genesis 4:8
If you’ve noticed – or maybe you haven’t because you’re either not observant (like me), or you skip over the Bible verse I post each day – but if you’ve noticed, I’ve been posting from Genesis. I’ll be posting early Bible history for a while. I’m not planning on mini devotionals every day about it, but I may throw in some every once in a while. If you want, you can follow along. 😊 Today’s verse points out that Cain carried out the first premeditated murder.
After lunch today, we rode around on our bikes – first around the Grayton Beach area.
Most were behind a ton of vegetation, but not this one.
but it looked to us like it’d been in a parade recently.
At one point, we got off, locked the bikes up and took a stroll on the beach on the other side of the river. It was a gorgeous day!
Didn’t look like they were catching anything though, and they weren’t smiling.
Then we rode the opposite direction, to the town(?) of WaterColor. I’m not convinced it’s really a town. More like an Urban community. I went in search of how it got its name and ran across an article that was published in the New York Times (of all places!) back in 2006 and found additional information at atlantamagazine.com. I’ll just share some highlights.
WaterColor, as its name implies, is surrounded by multihued seas: The Gulf of Mexico flanks its southwest side, while the 100-acre Western Lake curves into the resort’s heart. The property has belonged to its developers, the St. Joe Company, since 1927.
In 2002, St. Joe Company began selling parcels in a new neighborhood and was inundated by potential buyers (an average of 10 per site), so they put numbered balls into a fishbowl and an agent drew then out at random to decide who would be allowed to buy the home sites. There were certain restrictions and rules that applied to purchasing your lot, including the stipulation that the buyer had to break ground within three years. If you failed to meet the deadline, you could pay a penalty (as much as $2,500/month) or sell the land back to St. Joe at the original price. But four years later, most of the lots still sat empty.
Part of the reason was the hurricane season of 2005, when the real estate market along the Florida Panhandle ground to a halt. It seems many of the new landowners were speculators who had no intention of building. They were expecting to sell after six months and make a killing. A few did just that. One local builder won the lottery, paid $215,000 for a lot that he sold in early 2005 for $750,000!
After Hurricane Dennis hit in July 2005, most of the planned flips turned to flops. “People got caught day-trading lots. Those who did not want to sell their lots at a loss, but had no plans to build, were stuck. After years of double-digit appreciation, the market was so bad that some of them would’ve been happy to sell back to St. Joe at the original price, but St. Joe wasn’t interested, stating, “Our goal is to build towns.”
Well, it looks like things must’ve taken off sometime in the past 15 years, because there are a ton of homes here now! Here’s a cute little three-bedroom place you can pick up for a mere $2,195,000! And a great street name to boot – Mystic Cobalt. It doesn’t have water access of any kind (lake or Gulf), but hey, what can you expect for that price? And just in case you’re wondering, the price is only $872/square foot. A bargain!
I promise! I did NOT plan that!
Passing through WaterColor and on into Seaside, we came upon a huge mural of Vincent Scully. You know, the guy who was the voice of the Dodgers for 67 years – 1950-2016?
Not.
When I checked on Google to see what his connection was to Seaside (the community next to WaterColor), I didn’t see anything in his bio. So I Googled with more detail and found this:
The Town of Seaside and street artist Andrew Pisacane (aka Gaia) are paying tribute to historian and educator of art and architecture Vincent Scully with a wall-sized mural on Seaside’s purple wall facing Scenic 30A.
Scully’s death last November was mourned by scholars, students and lovers of architecture throughout the world. Scully taught architectural history for more than 50 years at Yale University and for nearly 20 years at the University of Miami. He also authored more than 20 books. His undergraduate lectures at Yale were always standing-room-only, as he was known as the most dramatic, impassioned and erudite teacher at the university.
Scully was one of Seaside’s early supporters and influenced many who contributed their design, planning and architecture talents to Seaside, several of them were his students at Yale, and many more who read his books or attended his lectures in Seaside.
Scully was revered for being able to explain the innate relationship between architectural style, urbanism and the environment to the mainstream. He inspired future architects with the idea of reconnecting contemporary architecture with its past, thereby planting seeds that grew into the New Urbanism movement. ~ SoWal.com
Too funny!!
See you tomorrow when I’ll share about how we stay warm in freezing temperatures! Bet you can hardly wait!