Florida Gulf Coast

Florida Woods

Florida Bayou

Soooo, here we are on the gulf coast of Florida.  The RV park is nice; however, there are a lot of older, retired folks here.  They play a version of miniature golf on the park roads (it’s kinda annoying when you are actually trying to drive on said roads!).  Pat "accidentally" drove over one of their golf balls.  Of course, "Big Bertha" squashed it flat.  Oh well, at least they had a marker to spot the new ball!  On the upside, we feel like young spring chickens here.

I guess we needed to go a little further south for those beautiful white sand beaches.  The beaches in this area are kind of few and far between (the nearest one to us is a thirty mile round trip) and not that big or beautiful.  The coast here is marshy and filled with a lot of wildlife and fish.  We did manage to avoid the freezing cold weather that hit the panhandle and northern Florida although we had some cool nights and rainy days.

Still the Best

We headed south to the Tampa/Clearwater area, saw a Willie Nelson concert, and spent the night.  We wandered our way around the bay area, took a neat bridge from Clearwater over to Tampa, drove around the bay and took a really awesome bridge back over to the Clearwater peninsula and then drove over to the gulf islands and drove north as far as possible before heading home.

Awesome!

We have found some great seafood here.  A Tiki Bar on the river that looks like a real dive serves wonderful mussels and shrimp.  Another one was right on the Homosassa River with a view to Monkey Island.

Homosassa River

Monkey Island

Right down the road from our RV park is a Florida State Wildlife Park.  Had a really nice time there seeing lots of Florida’s birds and animals.

Flamingos

Owls

We also visited the ruins of an old sugar plantation. We had planned to stay here for two weeks; but there really isn’t that much to interest us here.  One of the back jacks on “the 5^th” needs to be repaired. 



So, we changed our plans.  We are watching the Super Bowl and packing up to leave tomorrow and head to Orlando.   

Big Broncos Fan

           
We will stay there for three days, get the jack fixed, and explore Epcot and Animal Kingdom before heading to Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic coast where we will spend another three days.  Another example of the new flexible, relaxed, retired, Pat & Elaine!

Happy Guy