Happy Holidays to all our faithful readers! Again, sorry for the hiatus between postings. We spent the Christmas holiday with our daughter Melissa, husband Spencer, and son Nathan at a condo on the beach in St.Pete. It did seem a bit strange to walk on the beach with Christmas carols playing in my head. Nathan had his first experience with crawling on it, and once he got over the strangeness of the texture, he took to the sand like a duck to water! However, he never seemed to get the concept that sandy hands should not rub the eyes! The picture below was taken at sunset and he was looking right into its orange hues.
Nathan would rather stand than crawl, his great-grandpa Deiter thinks he will be walking in ten days.
While out walking on the beach we found another treasure besides our grandson. John noticed the above starfish, with its tentacles moving. Since it seemed to still be alive, I returned it to the water. It was up on the beach where many feet would soon trample it. What a beautiful, delicate sea creature! Sunsets in Florida are beautiful, as you may see below. While watching the sun set a pod of dolphins swam past us.
On one of the days while in St.Pete, we drove over to Fort De Soto Park. The 1,136-acre park occupies five keys. The fort itself, pictured below, is on Mullet Key.
From 1,000 A.D. to 1,500 A.D. Tocobaga Indians lived here. In 1849 Robert E. Lee was one of five engineers in a boat anchored off shore to consider it as a coastal defense for the Confederacy. No fortification came about at that time. The Spanish-American War in 1898 was the impetus to fortify the island, because of its proximity to Cuba. We were fighting the Spanish in Cuba at that time. In November of 1898 a wharf and the first officers quarters were built, other buildings soon followed. However, the fort did not see any military action until WWII, when an area north of it was used as a bombing range. We spent some time wandering around the fort and a couple of museums before walking on the beach. Mullet Key lies between Tampa Bay on the eastern side and the Gulf of Mexico, which lies on its western shores. Yesterday, Sunday, we returned to Fort Myers.
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