A PANHANDLING SEAGULL--

and a chilly girl friend

The seagull maintained a wary presence on this deck railing as it pressed its luck on finding a morsel of food from nearby restaurant guests.

That's Sue (right) during lunch at Waldo's seaside restaurant on a sunny but windy and chilly day recently.  Waldo's is part of the Driftwood complex featured on the blog in mid January.

While we have an occasional chilly day, snowbirds usually are grateful when we see hometown weather reports this time of year.

A not-so-balmy 60 degrees in Vero Beach always trumps temps in the middle teens back home as were reported on this day.

Dick and Dee Weeks with lady friend Sue Brooks (above) touring a car show...

MUSCLE CARS AND MAGNOLIAS--

There were about 40 of them sprinkled around the McKee Botanical Gardens that day; the kind of machines that make aging men salivate over a disappearing youth.

There were GTOs and Bonnevilles and 57 Chevys and a Shelby Cobra flanked by an artistic sculpture and adoring fan (right).

The gardens are 18 acres of lush, semi-tropical beauty in harmony, that day, showcasing blooms and Hemi engines with radiant fervor.

One fellow above paid close attention to a display sign while another male fan seemed, by his hand position, to be enjoying another distraction from his more youthful days.

The McKee Botanical Garden is located about a mile north of our Florida digs and will be getting more of our attention.  We became members one recent weekend while visiting a mixture of its natural beauty, an ongoing display of ourdoor, artistic sculpture and a one-day display of muscle cars.

Please stop by Saturday and enjoy our outing with Syracuse friends, the Weeks.

GOLF— 

The Miniature Variety

Finally, the weather conspired with our social calendar to allow us a round of golf.

This course, within walking distance of our camper, is like a grand ole’ lady—showing lots of wrinkles, however.

In its younger years the course must have been a dandy.  It is 36 holes of challenging design combined with an artsy, jungle motif.  It makes good use of the gently rolling terrain.  Streams full of BIG goldfish meander along its fairways and artificial pools—now dried up—offer additional fairway challenges.

In the upper picture Sue is putting in a cave-like structure which has a nice waterfall flowing above her back, outside the little window.  Even here there is evidence large decorations once graced the design.   Now, only rusty iron fittings and hanging wire remain.

The puddle of water in the middle photo is evidently from a recent rain, likely trapped in the fairway depression by a failed drain.

Note the rotted wooden steps in the left foreground of the lower photo and the absence of landscaping detail in the patches of bare ground.

Here and there around the course rotted wood has been replaced by treated lumber or the newer, resin-based material creating a pattern that seems totally dependent on the availability of scrap.

Elsewhere, old rotting ropes were showing the ravages of sub-tropical humidity and the sun had bleached colorfully painted tee markers.

The young man at the desk was politely apologetic when he inquired if we would be returning.  “We fix whatever we can as often as we can; almost daily,” he lamented. 

 

It’s the old business conundrum of not having sufficient revenue to keep the place in tip-top condition which leads to even less customers and revenue, and on and on….

The clubhouse is nice and offers lots of other recreational amusements like batting cages and a large, indoor arcade.

In spite of its evident deterioration, it was a fun way to spend an hour or so on a warm and lazy afternoon. 

We’ll play it again, and again; no doubt.

www.safarigolfandgames.com

THE McLARTY TREASURE MUSEUM

At Sebastian Inlet State Park

This little treasure along Highway A1A between Vero Beach and the Sebastian Inlet memorializes the violent destruction of a fleet of Spanish treasure ships, some just off-shore of the present-day museum, in a 1715 hurricane.

The fleet had been launched several years earlier, sponsored by Spanish King Phillip V who was desperate to bolster the kingdom’s treasury during the war of the Spanish Succession between 1701 and 1714.

He also was desperate for another important reason; his new wife was demanding a queen-sized dowry before she would consent to consummating their marriage.

So, the king’s ships traveled the world as far as the orient purchasing and plundering riches.  The vast fleet rendezvoused in Havana where the collected treasures were stowed on 11 ships and launched on their trip home, taking advantage of favorable currents along the coast of what is now known as Florida.

Spain used warships and forts to protect the treasure ships from pirates.  But, she could not protect them from hurricanes.

In 1715 a storm sank the fleet over a 100 mile stretch of shoreline between Sebastian and Fort Pierce.  700 crew members and passengers were lost at sea and 1,500 survivors struggled to shore. 

 

Within weeks salvagers arrived from Spanish headquarters in St. Augustine and from Havana to attempt to recover the treasure.  They were joined by natives, English pirates and assorted privateers of various nationalities who flocked to the area to retrieve—or steal from each other—as much treasure as they could.

Less than half of the material originally listed on the ships’ manifest reached the Spanish treasury.  The rest lay hidden in the coastal sea until one of the sunken vessels was found in 1928 near Fort Pierce. 

The next clues to the location of the treasure appeared in the 1940s when artifacts were uncovered at a site south of the Sebastian Inlet.

Major new discoveries still are being made along the Treasure Coast, often after later hurricanes wash away beaches, keeping very much alive, the hopes of modern treasure hunters.

As we left the museum, Sue quipped, "The movie never said whether the king ever managed to consummate his marriage.”

We chuckled.

 As if punctuating the meaning of the memorial, a storm boils toward the museum's boardwalk as we concluded our visit.

A boardwalk meanders through the foliage of the barrier island behind the McLarty Treasure Museum and treats visitors to a view of the sea where a Spanish treasure fleet was sunk in a 1715 hurricane.  Please stop by Saturday and enjoy a story of our visit.

THE INDRIO SAVANNAHS--

You have to know how deathly afraid of snakes Sue is to appreciate her courage in the above photo.

This day we slithered between the strands of barbed wire beside a gate on an access road that appeared to be a dike-like pathway between the little stream in the left of the above photo and an expansive area to the right most folks would regard as a swamp.

We joked about the unseen population of surrounding snakes while Sue mostly ignored us.  Warning signs about poisonous snakes we encountered later confirmed our suspicions.

We were in search of the new nesting site for eagles who apparently were disturbed from their previous home just to the south--one of whom was featured in the story of January 30th. 

We did find the new nest quite a bit east of that current trail and apparently close to where we saw the earlier bird.  That took us back to the trail of our January 30th outing where we subsequently found the nest well hidden in the high pine foilage and barely visible from the trail that offered the closest access.

It's not likely to be a good photography candidate.

Regardless, our 2 mile, round-trip hike was a refreshing outing in an eco-system very strange to we northern visitors.

Anywhere you hike in Florida, informed folks will maintain a high degree of awareness.  American alligators, feral hogs, poisonous snakes and an occasional jaguar all are possible encounters. 

As we enjoyed our walking expedition it was fun to joke about only needing to be able to run faster than the slowest person in our group in order to insure one's personal survival.

Can you imagine that discussion in our geriatric group?

and, our neighborhood
eagle...

On the day of the Indrio Savannah hike we later drove into a neighborhood that borders our RV park on the south and enjoyed the above peek of an eagle feeding its young in this nest between our park and that neighborhood of fine homes.

We can see this nest from very near our camper but the view is less obstructed from the opposite side as shown above.

Note also, the smaller picture is the full frame done with a 200 mm lens on my digital SLR camera.  I do not like to ever get close enough to these nests that I might become worrisome to the birds.  And, the closer you get the more your shooting angle is elevated until you are seeing only the underside of the nest.

Better to stay back, enjoy this viewing angle, and, enjoy the degree of enlargement possible with a quality lens on these cameras with a large megapixel capability.

The larger image was cropped and enlarged out of the middle of the smaller one thus making it appear I was much closer to the nest than I actually was.