Winter Wanderings 2012 - Day #19 - 2/14

This Valentine's Day (which only I remembered initially) was mostly sunny, comfortable & a bit breezy and was an "outing day" while we let our aging bodies recover from yesterday's efforts.  Moving at Emery warp speed we pulled out at 11:40 and headed on a pretty long drive, passing over the Tampa Bay Bridge and on to Fort De Soto County Park.

We had an enjoyable picnic beneath the palm trees beside the (very extensive) parking lot, towards the top right of the upper picture above, and then cruised down to the "fort" itself.  In its heyday it had been more of a military encampment (now long gone) and the only structure remaining was the heavy concrete combination of mortar batteries and magazines, which had been covered in earth upon completion and on which grasses and shrubs had been allowed to grow - briefly interesting but not photogenic.  The 1898 British-built rifled gun against the remains of which I was photographed was never part of the fort when it was operational but was cleaned up and moved there for posterity in more recent times.

We visited the gift shop and I found a suitable memento and then we returned to the top of the park and headed down to the beach, where we set up "camp".  While Peter sat and guarded our  stuff Jean and I took an extensive ocean-side walk of this complete section bounded at one end by an inlet and at the other by a seabird nesting sanctuary.  Once back we all settled down to read, do crosswords, etc.  Unfortunately a light persistent cloud cover took the heat from the sun and the breeze escalated to an unremitting wind so we abandoned a little earlier than we otherwise might have done & headed home.

We stopped at Costco both for a gas fill-up and a resupply of primarily fruits and vegetables and in response to my broad hints Peter suggested Jean pick out a nice bunch of cut flowers from the unusually plentiful supply that were there for obvious reasons.  Then we headed home and had a quiet evening.  It was a nice day.