November, 2003
Daytona Beach

I was going to take couple of days to get here but we had such a favorable winds that we zipped down to Daytona Beach in one day all under sail - my kind of day!

Here we also spent three days in similar format: town - beach - town. With some spicing: first time I the church since we left TACF.

The town is all right - nothing breathtaking but nicely developed. We were anchoring closer to the Seabreze side which made good place to walk to library and across to the beach. On the beach we found ourselves drawn to some college group having a weekend off. Beautiful girls and all-American boys. We didn't make any friends though but enjoyed some volleyball (Hi, Willson) and swimming.

From the library we picked up bunch of magazines which I was consuming at the alarming rate. But who really cares, right? So I won't rumble too much about things like that:)

Following day on Sunday we set ourselves to have some Church, Praise God! Off we went wandering what are we gonna end up with. We passed several Baptist churches which services were not to be for another hour, we even checked out some Catholic church but service was already over. Near the Black College we saw some church bus picking up some students - all black, so we jumped in in anticipation of some fiery black service. We drove for miles before we entered this compound which could only be described as "professional" church. Everything was dress for success and such was the church. Everything was high energy and high performance. I mean these guys could write a manual and have school on how to have church. Everything was pre-planned and executed flawlessly. It wasn't bad church - not at all. It was as close to the charismatic church as we could hope for, but somehow in this "be the best church" attitude I was missing something. It was more entertaining than inspiring. But that just me. Me and Johannes picked up couple of songs from there with which we were torturing each other for days to come. So much for OUR spiritual maturity!

(M)