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.