Thanksgiving Blog Spectacular!

Hi all and welcome to this special edition of Adventures in Florida!

Because we had a long and busy holiday weekend, this blog entry will be bigger (and possibly better) than ever. Everyone is just agog with excitement!

So let's see. I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving. Glenn and I started Thanksgiving Day at the gym, and then took the dogs out for a long walk. Al Lopez Park was closed for Thanksgiving but we parked nearby and walked on in anyway. (Such rebels!)

Sneaking in! Who's gonna stop us?

Anyway, it was a lovely walk in the park and made us feel less bad for leaving the dogs alone later that evening and eating approximately 10 million calories.

Such a pretty day!

We also spotted some sort of large black and brown striped snake. Can you see him?

That night we went to Chad and Lisha's for a lovely and filling Thanksgiving dinner. They had originally planned to go to Texas to spend the holiday with Lisha's brother Rob and his family, but Rob had to cancel due to some family issues. So it was just Glenn and I, Lisha and Chad, and Lisha's mom, Merylyn.

We had a wonderful time, even though the Steelers lost. I asked Glenn to fully document Thanksgiving in photos but he only took one photo of me and Mrs. Hogue. (It's nice though.)

Lisha and Chad have sold the beautiful house you see us in and should be closing on Dec. 19th; they are not sure yet where they are going to go. For those of you who have not heard, we also got a Thanksgiving miracle and found a buyer for our house in Pittsburgh. If all goes well, we should be closing January 9th. Fingers crossed!

Thanks to Glenn's staff, we got to go to see the Pens play the Lightning at the Tampa Bay Times Forum on Black Friday. There were a lot of Pittsburghers in the crowd.

We had very good seats.

Jokinen scores!

Pens won 3 - 0! As they say in the burgh --Woo!

Saturday, we let the pups catch up on some sleep and went to the Farmer's Market in Ybor City.

The Farmer's Market was rather lame...and actually more of a craft fair than a farmer's market. Very little produce, lots of macrame plant hangers.

Still, we had a fun little walk around Ybor (in the light of day). Here is a streetcar.

And here is a chicken.

Saturday night, we headed back to Jimmy's Crow's Nest in Clearwater to watch another sunset, despite a somewhat cloudy, cooler evening.

Sunday, Glenn and I decided to take a little day trip to the Sponge Docks in Tarpon Springs. Glenn can't pronounce Tarpon for some reason...he calls it TarPOONor TarPAWN, instead of TARpen. It drives me crazy. :-)

Anyway, it is a rather touristy area, but again it was a sunny nice day to walk around and look and sponges and Greek pastries that I could not eat.

They had lots of tours that said you could "watch a diver go down and bring back a real, living sponge!" I had some fun picturing the sponges screaming bloody murder and punching the diver in the face. "Nooooo! I have a family!!! Leave me alone!!!!"

We also had some fun in a boot shop.

On the way home, we took a quick detour to go see Lake Tarpon, which was very pretty. We didn't stay long though, as there were swarms of gnats everywhere.

So anyway, that's about it. I meant to tell you the story of Lobster Boy, but I shall save it for another time.

Can't believe it is December already! Looking forward to seeing everyone soon!