Your life is incredible. I so enjoy reading stories of you life experiences and the places you have seen. What a great way you met your hubby. If I saw a shark, I think I'd freeze in fear. I guess in a way that is a good thing. I can't imagine being out in the water relaxing and seeing one nearby.
Born at the end of The Great Depression in a quite different America, where doors were not locked, strangers welcomed and fed, and as litle girls (my sisters 5 and 9 years older), we freely and safely left home and either walked or went by Coral Gavles and Miami city buses anywhere we desired, without an adult.
WWII impacted us greatly, Pearl Harbor happening when I was 7 1/2 - sharpening my patriotism to the 'nth' degree. No time to indulge in fairy takes, instead playacting how brave I would be if I were a prisoner of the Germans or Japanese...collected scrap metal and newspapers to turn in for the War Effort...dug play foxholes in vacant lots with the little boys in the neighborhood...
Okay - it was a tad extreme to go into the U.S. Marine Corps!! LOL - I loved being a classroom instructor, though, and feeling useful to my country, during The Korean Conflict.
Spent 12 years as a military wife (Korean Conflict, The Cold War, Cuban Missie Crisis, Nam) - taught school one year - then spent 6 years in retail management, and after that, 18 1/2 years in and around medicine.
Crisscrossed up and down and around America (lived in 8 states, including Ohio twice and South Dakota) and in 1965-66, drove literally a line from above the Arctic Circle in Alaska to South Florida, and then up to South Carolina...in childhood, down the Florida Keys. Lived in Rochester, NY 2 years, and of course into that end of Canada...
Gypsy Woman is an All-American Woman...:)