North Jetty - Nokomis Florida

The sun lured us out for another mini-bike ride today.  There are quite a few places within 20 or so miles of the house, but one of our favorites is the North Jetty.  There are several cuts where you can go from the Intracoastal Waterway and the Gulf of Mexico.  This one has a long jetty and a park on both sides of the cut.

Lots of people coming out for a day on the beach now that we are fully into "the season".

Looking across the cut to the south jetty, we watched the dolphins frolicking amongst the boats going in and out to the Gulf.

Fishermen of all shapes and sizes:

Most were having success today:

Flounder for the bottom fishermen

Spanish Mackerel

Little Blue Heron

A whole tree full of Pelicans

The Jetty is a great place for looking for shells also.

 





Beaches and Sights of Venice

The south end of Venice Island, FL, is mostly city parks.

The first access to the beach is at Maxine Barritt Park.

Sharky's Restaurant is nestled between two parks and also has beach frontage and a long pier in front of the restaurant.

On the other side of Sharky's Pier 

is the Service Club Park

Where on the 3rd Saturday of every month, Florida Underwater Sports sponsors a weekend scuba dive.  Dunkin' Donuts supplies donuts and coffee for divers and the company logs divers in and pairs them up if they come alone to dive.

So, what they are diving for is mostly big shark teeth, such as this one.  This diver let us hold the big tooth and told us he dives every day for teeth and sells them to tourist shops in town.  

After thinking about it, we went back and asked him if the teeth he had were for sale, and how much.  To our dismay, this one was in the $1200 category.  Pretty and amazing, but definitely out of our price range.  I was tempted to rush back and get my snorkel and mask, but we were on a bike ride, so we continued on.

On our way up Venice Avenue, we came across this amazing Christmas decorative display.

The median had natural decorations - such as these Banyan trees,

and multiple colors of Hibiscus.

The shopping district of Venice has multiple dolphin 

statues, painted in colorful designs,

with turtles also taking their place on the avenue

making it an interesting place to walk.

Since we were in Venice, we stopped at Nokomis Groves,

and had a dish of chocolate/lime swirled ice cream.

Thunder Beach - Panama City Beach, Sep 09

Fortunately, the motorcycle started right up after being garaged for the past 6 months. Ron polished it up while I loaded up an overnight bag, and we were off in shirtsleeves in sunshine early on Friday morning, Sep 25.

We were surprised by a phone message from our friends Janice and Johnny, who had come all the way from New Orleans to meet up with us in Panama City. They were completing the "Trail of Tears" motorcycle ride and had been on the road for 10 days.


Our friends, Huck and Debbie, who had invited us to the Thunder Beach motorcycle rally, were settled in at a campground in the middle of the millions of vendors that had taken over the strip. So we rode to their place and met J&J there and other friends from our motorcycle circle.

After going together for a seafood meal fresh from the Gulf, Janice and Johnny and Ron and I dashed back to the hotel to watch the sunset from our beachfront patio.

As the clouds began to roll in this morning, Ron and I decided the prudent thing to do was hustle home before our 2 mile dirt road became a quagmire. Pleasant trip home before the heat of the day....no rain yet, but thunder heads all around. Should be another pretty sunset, and maybe a light show later!