Weather Cleared, Left Harbor, so to speak.

We avoided mixing with holiday shoppers and travelers and then winter (south Alabama style) arrived. Reverting to our northern genetics, we "denned up" until the wind, rain, and cold moved on. OK, there is cold and there is cold and 40/25 degrees is balmy in Wyoming but for wind and rain this area bows to no one.

We HAD to do some shopping in Florida so we combined that with a visit to Fort Pickens, the sentinel of Pensacola Harbor. The fort, finished in 1832, is a brick pentagon in outline but the overall military post presents a timeline of seacoast artillery and coastal defense through World War Two. As the fort is six miles from the Park gatehouse, you drive along the open coast of white sand and get some understanding of what isolation must have been like.

The original fort walls enclose "tunnels" like these which housed everything. There are deeper branches for gunpowder and such.

Thanks to wonderful events like the Civil War which spurred improvements in weapons that made brick forts obsolete, Fort Pickens saw changes such as detached artillery positions and defensive engineering construction.

This six inch gun was placed in 1976 to show what was supposed to have been in 1946, a job not completed.