Chalk it up to a nice weekend

Hi All -

It was another wild weekend here in Florida. I'm not sure if you saw it on the national news, but my first story is a sad one. Saturday morning, around 4 am, I woke up suddenly when our power flicked off and on.

In the morning, we discovered that a small plane had crashed onto McMullen Booth Road, less than a mile from our house, and hit the power lines as it was going down. Sadly, the pilot was killed - his teenage daughter and her friend are in serious condition in a local hospital. They had flown all the way from Chicago and were less than 6 miles from the St. Petersburg airport.

The highway was closed for the entire day as the FAA came down and investigated, which caused some huge traffic backups.

Anyway, a number of less dramatic events took place on Saturday as well. Glenn was walking around the pool with the leaf blower, blowing tree debris off our screens, when he slipped and fell on the bricks, ripping up both knees and his forearm pretty badly. Fortunately, as a trained as a dek hockey nurse, I was able to put him back together.

The bandaged version doesn't look nearly as bad, but trust me, he was a mess.

Mo says, "Are you okay?"

 In other news, you'll be happy to know that we got a new "hurricane-proof" garage door installed on Saturday morning. This should lower our insurance rates, and the new door will supposedly stand up to 160 mph winds.

You can see the steel reinforcements on the inside.

Glenn continues to force me to go bike-riding, so after the door was installed, we headed to Honeymoon Island State Park to take a ride. We found a nature trail there which was aptly named "Osprey Trail", because I have never seen so many ospreys in my life.

 

Their nests were everywhere too - we probably saw a dozen osprey. You can't really see from this picture below, but in the very middle over the white tree trunk is an eagle's nest - which had two eagles and two chicks in it.

It was a pretty nature trail, but at times we were pushing our bikes through sand or trying to ride them across flooded areas, which was a challenge.

Forunately, before we started, Glenn noticed that my back tire was virtually flat, which was probably why I had such a hard time pedaling on my first ride. He fixed it for me.

Here's another critter we spotted on our ride. A fearless armadillo.

It's hard to see his head and cute little ears because he was snuffling around for bugs, but he was cool. He looked like a little dinosaur. Neither of us had ever seen one before.

After our ride, we took a little stroll over to the beach.

 

On Sunday, we went to downtown Safety Harbor, where they were having their annual "Chalk Fest" and arts festival.

It was pretty cool. We also walked down around the grounds of the Safety Harbor Resort and Spa...

All in all, another action-packed weekend in Florida. Time for a nap.

Deuce seems to enjoy his bed more since he made a slight modification...

Hope you are all happy and well! Talk to you soon!