Clearwater, FL

After my parents left Florida we kept traveling up the coast. We stayed a couple of nights at Clearwater Beach where we enjoyed a stroll on the boardwalk. The city had a huge screen set up with a movie playing on the beach, lots of local artists and vendors, and pretty good entertainment. This fire breather led us on for half an hour and kept telling us we needed to stay and watch his entire show to see the BIG ending. "BIG ending people. You'll want to see the BIG ending. You won't believe what's going to happen for my BIG ending. I have an amazing BIG ending." We waited and waited and he didn't do anything very amazing but after twenty minutes of watching him we decided we had invested too much time to just walk away without seeing the BIG ending. I had my camera ready.... and all he did was blow some fire. A talent, I'll admit, but if I were him I wouldn't brag about the BIG ending to my show. People clapped but it was rather anticlimactic.

The next day we took a walk through beautiful Dunedin Park (pronounced done-eye-dinn.) There were a bunch of fruit trees with what we thought were tangerines growing on them. The branches were just dripping with more fruit than they could handle so we thought it wouldn't hurt to take a few. We discovered this the hard way, but later we were told that if tangerines freeze too many times they turn bitter. And I mean bitter. It was worse than biting into a lemon.

Then we ventured over to Tarpon Springs. It's a cute coastal Greek village that's been populated with Greek-Americans for over 100 years. I didn't feel comfortable taking too many pictures of people here because it seemed disrespectful, like I would be exploiting their everyday lives for my own pleasure of a few blog pictures. We witnessed a lot of old Greek men sitting on park benches, smoking, reading newspapers, wearing authentic greek fishermen hats and shooting the breeze in greek. It was great. I have never seen so many greek people in one place and it made me happy to know they have a community in Florida where they can feel at home with one another. We visited the local baker who was pulling fresh bread out of the oven. There were 12 paper bags on the floor each filled with five or six steaming baguettes. We wanted to buy some but the baker told us they were meant for the local restaurants. So we bought some spinach bread and a cannoli. After we left we saw the baker close shop and load the bags of bread into the back of her mini van. She drove down the street and delivered the fresh bread to a few different businesses. Awesome.

A lot of the locals are fishers, shrimpers and sponge divers. We learned all about the art of sponge diving and how it's safe to the plant and to the ocean to cut the sponges free for our own use. As long as the sponges aren't pulled out by their roots they will continue to grow back as big as you let them. Before seeing all of this I had never even taken the time to think about where sponges come from.

P.S. How sexy is my husband?!

Later, in the little Grecian Plaza we listened to a Jamaican guy playing some pretty good Reggae music. Random. Then we sat on the back of our car and made sandwiches for lunch like we do every other day. That's how we can afford this trip of a lifetime! We saw a bunch of crazy birds flying around and thought it was worthy of a picture. And after that we fell in love all over again with another picture to prove it! I feel lucky everyday that we have this vacation time to relax and create memories together.