Today my husband, Keith, and I decided to return to a place we had discovered only recently. It’s called Annie’s Creek, and it’s in the Charlotte Harbor Preserve State Park in Charlotte, County, FL. It’s one of those out-of-the-way places that you might never know about or happen across, tucked away in a rural corner of the county. It’s not just a creek, but a huge expanse of woods  and mudflats that you wade through to get to the creek.

This is my new “happy place”, because when I’m there, I am truly happy. It is incredibly beautiful. It is quiet except for the sound of wind and wave (and the occasional fish splashing). It is calming. It is rejuvenating. To get there you walk about 1/2 a mile through the most gorgeous pine flatwoods filled with great-crested flycatchers, woodpeckers, wildflowers, and wiregrass. Once you arrive at the water’s edge, stretched before you is the cleanest, clearest, most critter-rich mudflats I’ve think I’ve ever waded through. Then you wade or walk (depending on the tide) another 1/2 mile or so to the entrance to Annie’s Creek.

There are snook and ladyfish, stingrays and horseshoe crabs, sheepshead and snappers, conchs and whelks, ospreys and herons… the shoal grass and turtle grass are green and healthy, and the animals thrive there. It is a place full of life, a place full of wonder. And it is my new happy place 🙂

Do you have a happy place? Where is it? What is it like?