Tarpon Springs, Anna Maria Island, and Sanibel Island

Tarpon Springs has been one of our favorite stops.  We stayed at Turtle Cove, a fairly new marina close to restaurants, shops and the bike trail. The kind of bike trail Mary likes-on an old railroad grade, so there are no hills.

Mary Frances at Turtle Cove Marina:

There are many Greek restaurants in Tarpon Springs and we took advantage.  Saturday we had gyros for lunch-sausage for John, pork for Mary, accompanied by a Greek salad and Avgolemono (Chicken lemon) soup.  Sunday's dinner was Pastitso (Greek style lasagna with layers of macaroni and ground beef topped with tomato and cream sauce), Mousaka (layers of eggplant, potatoes and ground beef topped with cream and tomato sauce), Dolmades (seasoned ground beef and rice wrapped in grape leaves topped with egg lemon sauce), Gyro (seasoned lamb and beef), and Spanakopita (spinach pie). YUM!

Can you imagine a more perfect bike trail-and in December!

We rode 13 miles and ended up back at Spring Bayou to watch the manatees for an hour.

We left at 7:20 Monday morning, December 5.  We wove our way through the markers out of the Anclote river and back into the intracoastal waterway. We'd not seen a flock of roosting pelicans before:

We stopped at Anna Maria Island because Suki and Hal live here during the winter.  The dock behind our boat backed up to a mangrove swamp.  This osprey was trying to settle in, but grew tired of our conversation and left for a quieter resting place.

Hal, bearing the gift of 2 bottles of delicious Michigan wine, rode his bike to visit while John washed the salt off the boat.  We impolitely spent some of Hal's visit on the phone, as we had realized we hadn't had a bank withdrawal for propane, so John called Jo and asked her to check our propane tank.  It read empty, so John called the company.  They were evidently basing their planned fills for how often we've needed it in the past.  Since we burn wood and propane in a combination furnace, we don't use very much propane.  Even though we had explained to them that we are not burning wood this year, so wanted them to check and fill it regularly, something hadn't sunk in.  Jo graciously agreed to go back to our house to meet the delivery man as, when he saw the tank was empty, he turned it off and wanted to check the rest of our appliances as he thought we must have a leak to use so much more propane than in the past.  We don't have any appliances that feed off that tank.  They restarted the furnace and all is well, after only about 15 phone calls. Thank you so much, Jo. We shudder to think what may have happened with no heat in the house in a Michigan December.

Mary Frances at Anna Maria Island:

When Suki returned from having some work done on the car, she and Hal picked us up and took us on a tour of the island.  We certainly understand why they choose to spend time there!  We had dinner at their favorite restaurant and enjoyed another pretty sunset:

After dinner, we went to Joe and Barb's house.  Joe, John, and Hal were all in the same motorcycle club many years ago.  Barb and Joe sold John the 10 acres on Loomis Road that we used for a down payment on our house.

We were up early the next morning, as we want to keep moving so our kids don't arrive in Key West for Christmas before we do.  We traveled 100 miles on the intracoastal and arrived at Sanibel Island at 3:30.

The intracoastal is varied through here, from swamps to big cities to large homes.  Here's Mary's favorite site along the way:

(Hey, Sara, I'm putting one of these on my Christmas list, how about you?)

Even though our boat isn't very tall (13 feet with the antenna down) there are still some bridges with such low clearance that we have to request an opening:

There are many manatee protection signs along this section of the the intracoastal.  We saw some more dolphins today, but no manatees. Some of the signs say "Manatee Zone Idle Speed No Wake" others "Slow Speed Minimum Wake" and there's "25 MPH Within Channel, Idle Speed 100 Feet Out of Channel".  The signs also make good platforms for osprey nests:

Gasparilla Rear Range Light:

One of the reasons we chose Sanibel Island was a wish to reconnect with Vickie and Paul, who did the loop in their SeaRay in 2008-2009.  We met Vickie at the spring loopers' rendesvous we attended in Charleston in 2008.  We met Paul when they stopped in Mackinaw City while doing the loop.  We didn't have much time with them, as John was still working so we were only in Mackinaw for the weekend.  They drove from their home in Cape Coral and we had dinner together.  It was wonderful to see them:

Sanibel Light-the keeper's house is on stilts:

Because of the island's orientation, the tide washes a lot of seashells and sea creatures onto Sanibel beaches:

We picked up some shells today and rode 15 1/2 miles along some of the island's many bike trails.  Another sign we don't see in Michigan:

Just in case you're concerned that Santa won't be able to visit us because there's no snow for his reindeer: 

We are at Sanibel Marina and every morning at 7 AM they deliver blueberry muffins and a paper.