It feels like forever since I’ve written here. I better get used to it—you too—because after looking at our proposed stops it appears I might only be on once a week or even a bit longer than that.
After leaving the Dallas side of the family on Tuesday morning we drove to East Texas, near Tyler, to see one of my bff’s Michelle at her house. We left early in order to beat the snow that was moving from the west across the DFW metroplex. We made it to Terrell, just east of Dallas on I-30, when the snow started. It snowed the entire day and melted as it hit the ground, that is until about 4pm when it decided to start sticking. Then, my friend, it was snowball fight time!
It was so beautiful to watch it start accumulating. We were at Michelle’s mom and dad’s house, which is five minutes from hers, and they have a huge picture window in their living room. They get a ton of birds in the yard, cardinals and bluebirds and others, and seeing them playing in the snow was magical.
Chris and Michelle started a snowball war…
It started sticking more and we went back to Michelle’s house because her husband John Paul was home. It was more snow fun over there:
John Paul…
Kylen, their daughter, throwing her own mini-snowball. She wanted to join in the fun!
Michelle made a really large one to try to get back at Chris; he was throwing some doozies!
This is one of my favorite photos I took of Kylen because she was so interested in the camera and her cute little face makes me smile. She’s a sweet little girl.
It was a fun overnight trip, one I really wish I could do more often. We drove all sorts of backroads through there, looking for birds. The bluebirds were really cool, and I don’t recall seeing them before. However, we both talked about how much we see that we didn’t ‘see’ before when we were here. Like, how many red tail hawks are around or the roadrunners, too. We even saw a merlin on the interstate on the ride home.
It’s been a busy week here. We spent a lot of time and money yesterday buying food for our maildrops. We’re putting them together today; we ended up with 11. We started buying at Sam’s Club, then Walmart, Whole Foods and Tom Thumb because each place didn’t have everything we needed. We’re doing a time lapse of putting it all together so we’ll show that soon.
I was Marc and Eliana’s last night for dinner and was lamenting to Eliana that we needed to have spent more time at Cayo Costa State Park while we were there over Christmas weekend. It was truly a beautiful and magical little place.
To get there you have to drive north of Cape Coral to Pine Island and nearly to the tip of that island and then catch a ferry over. We thought there wouldn’t be too many people two days after Christmas, but the ferry was packed. The downside is that the ride costs, I think $50 a person, to get over there unless you have your own boat. We figured that the $50 a person wasn’t too bad considering that we didn’t know when we’d ever get back over there. Plus, once you are there, you could stay almost as long as you wanted to camp. If you figure that into the cost, it isn’t nearly that bad. The ride over is an hour long, though the two islands are not that far apart from each other. The problem is that the area has very narrow channels and you can’t speed through in a ferry boat!
This will be the first post of probably three of this little excursion. Too many great photos to share and I don’t want to overload it all at one time.
Oh, I will also preface to say this is an excellent shelling beach.
We were at Dinner Island WMA on Sunday afternoon, driving around with our friends Randy and Kathy, when through the cattle pasture we heard this high pitched noise. Eventually we came up to the two bulls making the noise, in the midst of what seemed like a territory war of some sort, or maybe one was miffed the other took his gal. Who knows, but it was hilarious to watch them! Check out the puffs of steam coming out of his mouth—see it was cold here! Lots of throwing of dirt…it was great entertainment!
The photo challenge is up over at Meghan’s blog: Strangers on the Street. I know there are at least two people who read that I could persuade to participate….Robin and Eliana. ooh, and Shelly. There really aren’t any rules other than to break out of a rut and try something new. I’d say use whatever camera you’ve got and try being creative. We’re trying to put together something weekly, so hopefully it’ll work out.
I’ve got more reverse lens stuff to post later today…stay tuned!
(yeah, it hurt coming back down from that one—front handspring. Wet grass, my inflexible 29 year old body—no, I’m not the 16 year old who bounced around my parents living room anymore.)
And because you are in the jumping mood, you know you wanna watch this:
Posted by mlittle on December 30, 2009 at 5:47 pm under Friends. 1 Comment.
When we left Marc and Eliana’s house on Friday night we decided we’d meet them at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary at 7am on Saturday morning. From our house it is about an hour and a half drive and from theirs, add at least another forty-five minutes.
We weren’t exactly bright eyed and bushy-tailed when we got there. It was early.
Chris and I arrived first and hit the boardwalk after I downed the majority of my coffee since disposable materials aren’t allowed on the boardwalk. He set out for the cypress dome and I wanted to see what I could come up with in the fog that had rolled in across the open prairie. I wasn’t too successful with the fog but I did get some shots that I enjoyed.
Marc and Eliana are birders, something which Chris and I aren’t very good at. Well, we aren’t good at the little birds like finches, warblers and the like. They are pretty good at noticing the calls and it helps that their iphone has a spiffy app for bird calls so they can double check to see what bird it is. I think we racked up a bit of knowledge that day!
We saw a minute amount of wildlife, mostly at the first half of the trail. Eliana and I spotted two Big Cypress fox squirrels in some cypress trees, chewing on the cypress balls. I haven’t seen very many of these squirrels—they’ve been replaced by the more common grey squirrel. They were fun to watch for awhile and I know Chris got a few good photos. As we were going up to tell Marc and Chris about the squirrels they told us about a very docile red shouldered hawk that was being kind enough to sit still for photos. We switched places and started taking photos of the hawk.
This is the area where the super ghost orchid is located. Since it is out of the blooming season we had a bit of a time trying to point out just where it was off in the distance.
I think this is where Marc was looking for the yellow crowned night heron. A volunteer had set up a scope at the pond to let visitors check out the birds. This time of year is peak birding season here in Florida, when all of the migratory birds head south to stay cozy for the winter.
Reflection in the duckweed…
Stay tuned for the rest of the trip….
Does anyone have any good podcast recommendations? I’m looking for some podcasts that are free but of a high caliber. It can be gardening, outdoors, crafts, photography, well, just about anything that you can tell that is of interest to me. Send it my way!
And when you can’t stoop any longer, find a nice mound of shells, sit down and dig right in.
We had an awesome weekend that continued from Marc and Eliana’s house over to the west coast at Sanibel and Cayo Costa State Park. I have so many photos to go through—I’ll have plenty to write about this week!
Christmas day started off a little bit on the wrong foot. A door was left open or didn’t get closed entirely when Chris left to do an early morning photographic expedition down at Everglades National Park, and three of the cats at Marc and Eliana’s escaped. We only knew about it when one of the cats, Desi, ended up in a fight with a neighborhood stray. I thought he was fighting with another cat in the living room until Eliana knocked on the bedroom door and got me out of bed to look for the third cat, Timber, that they couldn’t find.
It was a long day of walking the neighborhood, putting up some fliers, talking to neighbors and calling the cat. We took a long break after lunch, knowing the cat would lay low in the middle of the day. Around 4:30 Eliana and I were several blocks over when Chris comes zooming up in the car and letting us know that they found the cat in the front yard of the house directly behind them—probably where she’d been all day. *phew*. A huge weight was lifted. I had a feeling she hadn’t gone far, but still, knowing she was out there made for a long day.
Christmas Eve was nice, a quiet evening of pizza, drinking wine and sangria, playing Cranium and listening to Eliana repeatedly sing George Michael’s Last Christmas. Seriously, that song and not something like Carol of the Bells or Oh Holy Night or even Rudolph. Needless to say it ended up in our heads!
Not long after I’d been there Eliana ushered me into their computer room to give me a present. I didn’t have any idea what it was since she said it was for both of us until she started getting all giddy and I saw the size of the box—then I guessed. Glo Bars!. From Oh She Glows.
We tried the Chocolate PeppyMint and they were good! mmmmm!
Then somehow Eliana conned Chris into running out to find a Chia Pet. You see chia seeds are all the rage in the health food world right now and I’d never put two and two together to realize that they are the same plant…duh! Apparently Eliana had been wanting one and had been looking but never found it. So, at 6pm on Christmas Eve we went to Walgreens for a Chia Pet.
We brought her back a dinosaur chia! Oh, and we stopped at a gas station to fill up and Chris came back out and said that
George Michael had been playing over the intercom!
Our Christmas meal was quite non-traditional, a butternut squash pesto pizza. One vegan (vegan cheese—which actually wasn’t bad) and a regular one. Honestly, one of the best pizza’s I’ve had! Really good recipe to try.
After dinner and some relaxing we ended up playing with light painting and photography again and then some crazy jumping in the front yard, but all of those photos are on Chris’ camera and he doesn’t feel like processing them right now. I think there are some very cool shots in there!
