Joe & Wilma's Excellent Adventures

Saturday - June 25 -- We got started on our busy day right after breakfast.  John and Joe loaded up Barbara's spare bed and hauled it back to their house, and Joe brought the RV back to John's.  I started my room-to-room search for everything we had brought in, and we started loading when they got back.  Although we made several trips, we will still have a lot to load in the morning.  Next up, we took the Explorer to the car wash, mostly to get the beach sand vacuumed out of the back, since the outside had been rained on and wasn't too bad.  But they ran it through the wash while we ate lunch next door, then off we went to University of Tampa so Bridgette could feed the seahorses.  We picked up Barbara on the way, and got to see where Bridgette is currently working while they get her new office ready for her.  This really is a beautiful campus, and it's nice that Bridgette gets to work at a school with such modern equipment and wonderful classrooms.

 It really is a beautiful campus, and it sits right on the Hillsborough River.

Bridgette took us into her building and showed us her temporary desk, and the office they are fixing up for her (which was a storage room).

Then we went into the lab, and she demonstrated a piece of equipment they use for DNA testing.  She also showed us a package of frogs in formaldahyde (yuk).  Some of her classy UT students really don't like to get their hands dirty, so that should be interesting experiments. 

Next we went into the lab where her boss is raising the baby seahorses, and Bridgette mixed up the food for them (shrimp eggs).  The babies are hard to see, but they are clinging to the seagrass in this . photo below.

We have seen lots of mailbox posts out here that are fish -- dolphins and manatees mostly, and also some birds (pelicans), but we found one of a seahorse that we thought Bridgette might want to get for her boss.  (This was in Marco Island on Monday).

Then we walked down to their dock on the river, and she caught a ctenophora (pronounced "tenafore) to show us, which looks like a form of jellyfish but is a different family and is not harmful.  John and Joe walked down through the rocks and found some oyster beds.  All pretty cool stuff.

We came back through the building and Dr. Bridgette showed us one the classrooms she will be teaching in.  We all sat down like students, but she didn't have her lecture notes with her, so we got off without any homework.

Finally, we finished up here and headed for Costco, in our efforts to get ready to leave tomorrow.  We got home and put those purchases away, then had a hot game of dominoes to finish out the evening. 

Sunday morning, we finished loading (which was much more than one would think).  We went to Village Inn for our last breakfast with the doctors, and then Joe and I went off to Publix to finish our grocery shopping, since we (I) got too tired on Saturday.  We finished up with everything (with help from J and B, and got on the road at 11:10.  We did get invited back, but John intends to put a lockbox on the thermostat before we are allowed to stay, since he thinks we messed up his temperature programming (we denied it).

We only went 155, to the Collier-Seminole State Park outside of Naples.  But the mosquitoes here about carried us off.  We were the only ones in this campground, so we had our choice of all 120 spots, and we tried out 3 different ones before we settled in (getting eaten alive by mosquitoes throughout this process).  After we rested for an hour, we decided to drive around this park and head to Marco Island, about 10 miles away. The Black River (which was black) flows through this park, and has a boat ramp, and allows access to "10,000 Islands" and the Gulf of Mexico. This water is definitely brackish but it would be a nice river float if you could stand the mosquitoes.  We stopped by the water, and there was an alligator watching us.  It was a decision on even to roll down the car window to get a picture, but I did attempt it.  He's in the reflection of the trees, though so he is hard to see.

We then drove through the every exclusive area of Marco Island.  We couldn't get to the water without paying for parking, so we gave up on that and headed back to the park, and got caught in a pretty significant rainstorm.  We decided to stop at a bar and grill right outside the park, but we sat in our car 15 minutes waiting for the rain to let up.  As we came back in the park, we checked on our alligator again, and he was on the further side of the river (must have gotten under the trees during the rain).  We also saw some kind of hawk here.  And this park is full of squirrels, birds, and Tuesday morning, a raccoon was visiting the campsite in front of us.  Guess we'll have to add a raccoon to the traveling zoo now.  My web site was really slow here and it took a long time to get this blog done, but now it's time to get the car hooked up (as soon as I douse myself with mosquito spray), and hit the road, heading to Florida City, right outside the Everglades. 

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