Next to Last Summer Weekend - Myakka State Park

It's hard to believe that the summer is almost gone.  WHEW!  And also hard to believe that this coming weekend will mark the sixth anniversary of my move to St. Pete.  Time flies when one is having soooooo much fun.

To begin the weekend, Steve and I went to one of our favorite cafes, Meze 119 Bistro.  It's Middle Eastern vegetarian and the food is delicious.

On Saturday we took a trip down to Myakka River State Park which is just east of Sarasota.  Since Steve moved here from San Francisco early this year, and being a park ranger in a previous life, he hasn't been to many places outside of St. Pete and was craving an outing to an area where he could see some of Florida's natural ecological systems.  And I can't say I've seen too many either beyond St. Pete proper.

It was a short drive to the Park.  It was magnificent!  It was amazingly quiet.  You could hear a whisper from a distance.  Those black buzzards in the tree could overhear our whispered conversation very easily.  :-)

We went to the Canopy Walkway which is suspended 25 feet about the ground and extends 100 feet through the hammock canopy.  A tower soars 74 feet in the air at one end, "to present a spectacular view of treetops, wetlands and the prairie/hammock interface.  You can look down on eagles, hawks, vultures and the tops of live oaks and palm trees."

We spent several hours there, then headed over to Siesta Key to have some dinner.  We made a pit stop for gas and some refreshments (a Big Gulp and a Slurpee!) on the way.  We walked around the Siesta Key Village for a little and had dinner at The Hub before heading back to St. Pete.

Sometime in the near future, we'd like to pack a picnic lunch and head back to the park.

A Day at Sunset Beach with the Rays

This summer Florida has been blessed with such beautiful weather!  And as some long timers have said to me, the almost daily afternoon or evening thunderstorms are the way things used to be more regularly in the not too distant past.  At the end of this month, it will mark six years that I have lived here in St. Pete, after living in Albany (NY) all of my life.  I am enjoying the majestic power of the storms.

For the past three weeks a small group of us who have the luxury of having the time, have gone to the beach one day each week.  Today was an unusual one in that there were many fevers of rays (I looked it up and that's what it's called!) swimming around the shallow waters at the beach.  We were trying to figure out if they were sting rays or manta rays (or maybe Cownose rays like the ones at the Tropicana where the Tampa Bay Rays play; I looked this up on Wikipedia).  At times when we were out in the water, we'd see a fever swimming towards us, then they split in two and pass us on both sides.  All afternoon they were swimming back and forth, sometimes almost up to the beach sand.

And we saw a manatee swim by too!  It's in that picture with the two guys, that long shadow is the manatee swimming close to Dave.

After heading home from the beach, Steve and I decided to swing by Georgie's for the happy hour special of half price appetizers.  We hadn't eaten all day, so ordered four different ones.  The Chicken Cordon Bleu Balls and the Provolone wedges were gone before I took a picture.  We ran into a couple of friends who snapped that picture of us.

Happy Birthday Joe!

Happy Birthday Joe!  Another great year and more great memories!  I'm looking forward to many more!  LOVE YOU!!!

Celebrating Our Birthdays - Ruby and G-Pa

My slideshow of my recent trip to NYC to celebrate Ruby's and my birthdays.