Monday-Tuesday

Tuesday, June 21 - We sent J and B back to work on Monday, and we had the day to ourselves.  Joe's cold has made his treadmilling difficult, but he has been putting in his time when he can - he was up to 40 minutes, but last night he had to quit at 30, I think. I guess we have to have the Claytons bring back our elipitical when we get home so he (and I) can try to get on an exercise program. He's done well here, but I haven't even tried since I am still coughing so much, especially when I get hot. But he usually has entertainment when he walks -- John playing ping pong on the Wii, or Bridgette boxing. I'm not exactly sure what he is going to expect from me when we get home. We did venture out shopping today for a while, just to get out of the house. Found our first Panda Express since we left Arizona, so we had a nice lunch there. Walked through part of the mall, Costco, and Bed Bath and Beyond, then called it a day.

Tuesday John left for a 3-day trip to Puerto Rico for a meeting, and Bridgette was going out on the UT boat to collect samples with some of the UT students, so we decided to take a drive, but I had to have help getting Joe out of bed. 

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Once Annie gave him a good licking, the other dogs assisted and he got up.  They were ready, though, in case he had to have more assistance.

We headed over to Alafia State Park, which is on the Alafia River.  It had a nice campground, but it is a really mountain biking park, with challenging off-road trails.  Once the site of a phosphate mine, the topography offers some of the most radical elevation changes in Florida (which is a pretty flat state).  The reclaimed mine altered the landscape here and created new landforms such as several small lakes, and steep grades which made it popular for bikers.
 

The bike trials were built by volunteers from a Bicycle Club, and the park even provides a bike wash rack.  We did not do any hiking here, believe me (it was 95 degrees, with 60% humidity), but Bridgette and John have, and Bridgette said they run a marathon here too.  Bridgette has not tackled this route yet, but just give her time.

The river runs along the edge of the campground here (we did NOT go swimming), and there were some small lakes right at the campground too, but they were moss-covered and very low. 

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We looked for wildlife of any kind, especially gators.  We did see an osprey on a tree limb pretty close (Joe spotted it), but an nosy squirrel scared it before I got the camera ready.  We had seen some osprey nests on the way into this park, and there were even 2 ospreys in one of the nests.



The trees here were laden with Spanish moss, and this would make a good movie setting for jungle scenes.  On a cooler day, this would be a good place to spend some time (maybe November).

There were 2 other entrances to this park, one right by the river, so we drove over to it.  The river was really shallow here, but there were a couple of people fishing out of the back of a pick-up truck.

We headed north, with no specific destination except that it was lunch time.  We found a local restaurant in Plant City to take care of that, then we started working our way a little bit east, with no particular destination in mind.  We did see some wild pigs alongside the road, and Joe even turned around so I could get a picture, but they spooked before the camera decided to click, so I only caught their foraging area in my picture.  There was a litter of 5, I think, but you have to use your imagination on this one.


Joe is always interested in the agriculture of the states we are in, and Florida has a pretty wide variety of that.  We passed through huge citrus groves, acres and acres of tomato fields (the tomato season is just over here, so the vines are now dead, and the tomatoes are dying on the vines).  We have been watching the fields near J and B, and they are taking up the tomato stakes and stacking them at the ends of the fields.  We also passed some pepper fields, and we came upon this one field with probably 100 or more pickers, with lots of vehicles out there.  Joe pulled in to see what was going on here, and it was a pickle field.  It looked like they filled baskets, then dumped the baskets into wooden crates.








We headed on down the road and came upon Lake Manatee, another very low lake with the boat ramp out of the water.  There is a Manatee River and a Little Manatee River here, and we don't know if both of those rivers feed into this lake, but there was more evidence here of how badly Florida needs some rain.




Our last stop was at the Rye Preserve.  We have seen several "preserves" but not driven back to any of them, so we decided to check this one out.  There was also a Sheriff's Youth Camp back here, as well as trails to the river, camping, restroom and shower.  On our way in Joe spotted a turtle chomping grass right beside a parking area.  It was a very cooperative turtle, so we got a good turtle picture. 
The Manatee River runs through this preserve, and we met a couple of kayakers who stopped here (they had not seen any gators on the river).  The Lake Manatee Damn releases into this river, and there was a warning sign about sudden changes in its depth.  It was a pretty setting.

The blog web site is having some problems today and I've had a lot of trouble trying to get my pictures in the right place, so I hope it all makes some sense, and I really hope blogspot gets its problem fixed.  Some of the coding may also appear, which I tried to delete but it keeps reappearing, so I am giving up on that.   I had to consult with my expert, Cathy, to get my pictures to load at all, so Cathy, thank you again.