Adventures in Florida: The Callihans Take Tampa: March 2023

Hey everyone!

The past few weeks, we've been uncharacteristically social. Shortly after we returned from the mountains of Blue Ridge, my former coworker and friend Tao (he was a programmer with me at Mullen) said he was coming to Clearwater on a vacation with his girlfriend, Kristen, and asked if we could meet up.

We went with them to Clearsky for dinner and then sat by the bonfire with them outside of the Sand Pearl and had a fun and lively evening.

Then, March 2nd, Glenn's niece Bethany came down to stay with us for a few days, being the first member of the Callihan family to do so. (Justin is coming down for a few days in August for a conference in Tampa.)

Anyway, Bethany is Ray and Sue's oldest daughter. I believe she just turned 31, and she lives in Nashville. Glenn had dinner with her when he was in Nashville on a recent work trip and invited her down. He also happened to have good tickets for a Penguin vs. Lightning game, so he took her and Chad and Chad's "little Brother" Derrick. The Pens won and a good time was had by all! (I stayed home and watched TV. Eddie kept me company.)

Look at that face!

They had really good seats!

Chad later reported that Derrick had a blast, so he's just acting tough for the camera.

The next day, we took Bethany into Safety Harbor and walked around. Saw the Baranoff tree...

...went to the pier and saw a couple manatee noses (sorry, no pics!)...and drove over to Phillipe Park.

There we saw a crowd gathered along the shore wall, and there was a dolphin swimming back and forth along the wall fishing. (We've heard of this dolphin playing with a local dog.) Anyway, he was very entertaining and I've never been so close to a wild dolphin. I'll show you a picture, which is not great, but encourgage you to watch the video link.

Here's the link to the video on YouTube. Leave the sound off. Bethany is in the purple shirt so she got a great view. https://youtu.be/9I3-T3F76LI

We also walked around and admired more lovely trees. It never gets old.

That night we took Bethany to Nona's for pizza. Saturday, Chad and Lisha invited us all out to their place in Ozona to fish off their dock. We didn't think they were going to be there, but happily they were, so Chad, Glenn and Bethany fished while Lisha and I hung out.

At one point, I spotted a relatively big shark (five or six footer - Lisha said it was a bull shark) in the shallow water. We were all so in shock that no one got a pic until it had swum into deeper waters, but here's proof it happened. I drew a line under it so you can get a sense of size.

Needless to say, no one caught any fish after this, so we all went out together on Chad's golf cart for a long leisurely lunch nearby, and then he took us for ice cream.

That night, we took Bethany to Clearwater beach (which unfortunately is experiencing Red Tide right now, so everyone was coughing and eyes watering and there were tons of dead fish. Ugh.)

And we went back to Clearsky for dinner.

With the Red Tide and spring break, we probably won't go back to Clearwater until July.

Anyway, Bethany left the next morning but we all had a great time together.

During this time, Glenn made the catastrophic decision to switch from an iPhone to a Samsung Galaxy, which set off a series of unfortunate events - his Apple watch stopped working, his Apple Car Play system stopped working, he couldn't get the text or phone components to work, so basically he had a nice camera/paperweight that was going to end up bankrupting us.

Since then, I am happy to say that he has gotten everything working and now loves his new phone, and it is quite good at taking pictures. Some of the pics above were taken with his new phone, a few are mine, and Chad sent us some. Here are some others he's taken recently.