Bye-Bye 09

Christmas eve day and we're packed up and heading south to Estero, we had a lot of fun with the kids down for the week but there is no way we could keep up with them, right now we just want to get set up in the warm weather and relax for the holidays. We have a lot of friends in this area so I think we're going to be pretty busy during our month here.


The day after Christmas (Saturday)and we decided to drive over to the Conservancy of SW Florida Nature Center, they're doing a remodel of the place so it was kind of a mess ans the boat rides are closed until sometime in January, the good news is that it's free until they finish the construction. To tour the Discovery Center and walk two short nature trails was a little over an hour, our favorite part was the baby sea turtle they have there. She's about a year old and was swimming like crazy when the ranger came into the room because she thought that it was feeding time, since she will be released back into the wild when she's about 4 years old they make her catch her food so that she;ll know how to do it in the ocean. They do this by putting live items in the aquarium and making her hunt them down, they told us that she was getting pretty good at it and that just last week she caught a spider crab and ate it one leg at a time, the only problem was that the crab was a room mate and not for eating.

Today (Monday) we figured we would kill some time touring the Edison-Ford Winter homes and estates, about a twenty minute drive to find out that everybody in the state is there today, we keep forgetting about holidays, looks like everybody that has visitors over the holiday decided to bring them here. Their were only a few parking spaces open in the second overflow lot and the line at the ticket window had to be at least a 30 minute wait, time for plan B. Drove out to Manatee Park to watch the manatee swimming in the canal, not gonna happen, there were no parking spots open here and the people were standing should to should, time for Plan C. We ended up taking the long way home and did a bunch of stops to do some junking but didn't find anything worth while.

Wednesday we drove down to Everglade City, thought that we might take a boat tour at the National Park, but like everything else the place was packed and they were booked for the next two tours, no problem our real reason for this road trip was to stop at the Old Depot Inn for their crab cakes. It was a little crowded but not two bad, a nice table out on the dock and an order for two crab cake lunches. We've been coming here when ever we're in the area for about ten years now and have never been disappointed until today, it appears that there are new owners and a new kitchen staff, a fast food place wouldn't serve stuff like this at least it came with a side order of coleslaw and fries. The coleslaw was in a little plastic throw away cup and 14 fries, I counted them, and another one bites the dust.


New Years Eve day, we did a little hiking at the scrub over at Estero Bay State Buffer Preserve, about three miles and all we saw was four Gopher Turtles and a lady with a french poodle that was having a ball chasing his Frisbee into the river and bringing it back, think was he would only bring it to Cathy, who would then hand it to the owner.











We decided to go big time for New Years Eve this year, we drove out to Barefoot Beach and watched the sunset on 2009 and then stopped at the local Five Guys Burger and Fries for dinner.

Happy New Year and Welcome to Twenty-Ten.