April 17th, 2023

Normally, at this time on a Monday, Joy and I would be deep into our Photo Safari, happy snapping everything in sight.  We would already be dirty and our shoes and socks would be soaked from walking through dew-heavy grasses.  (It's a wonder we don't have trench foot!)  However, in the rather early not quite light today,  we both, in our respective homes, woke up to full orchestration thunder and lightening and pouring rain.  Joy texted me first to cancel just ahead of me doing the same.  So there goes our Monday morning plans.  Time to fall back and regroup.  

So today I think I will write up our last Photo Safari instead which was finishing up the Lemon Bay hike we began the week before.  If you follow that.  I'm not 100 percent certain that I do.  At any rate, I am calling this the Lemon Bay Hike Part II because we literally finished what we began the previous week. 

As I stated in the last photo safari report last week, the Lemon Bay Hike was one of discovery.  Neither of us had even been there before so we had no idea what to expect.  Since this was our second visit, it was mostly about finding out what else was there waiting to be discovered.  As you can clearly see in the photos below, we 'discovered' a small wooden bridge fairly early in the hike.
​

And then there was my personal goal.  I was determined to find water.  Where the heck was the Lemon Bay part of the name?  I could see it on the birds eye view map that I looked at on the computer at home.  It was right there, about an inch and a half away.  But which path should we take to get there?  How could we, as hikers in the preserve, manage to find the actual Lemon Bay?  A bay is a relatively large body of water which would make it hard to hide, right?   We kept thinking we were close,   perhaps around the next turn or over the next little rise?  But no.  This was the ONLY water we saw and it was just a little peek-a-view:

Pretty enough for sure, but dang, what a disappointment to have traversed trail after trail, path after path, over bridges, up (admittedly small) inclines and down into gulleys and then leave having never seen the actual Lemon Bay. Drat.

We did however stumble across a large concrete structure in the middle of nothing out there. It looked like a very strange garage. A discovery to be sure and a rather mysterious one at that.

I  managed  to capture more insects than usual so that was a nice treat.  There was one doggone dragonfly that I absolutely could not get a clear shot of. The wind was blowing just enough that the blade of grass he was desperately hanging onto kept swaying, first one way, then the other.  I'll include the best blurry shot of that for absolutely no good reason at  all:

I don't know if you recall or not, but at the previous trip to Lemon Bay, we found a tree with not one, but two eagles in it!  And they were up close and personal which was very cool.  This time we saw only one of the eagles. No idea where the other one was.

Naturally I captured some pretty botanicals.  I love everything out there and try very hard to get pictures of the best stuff, but let's face it, things that don't move are my photography jam:

What else did we discover:  Let's see,  there were a lot of gorgeous paths and some very interesting trees:

A few other things that don't fit any other category really, so here you go, have some rando's:

So that's about it.  I think I've pretty well catalogued all of our discoveries now from the Lemon Bay Preserve (Parts I and II) hike.  We had a great time, as we always do, but I think we about covered it and probably do not need to return there for awhile.  

Since we weren't able to hike today, I'm not positive when we will be getting back out there, but for sure, we will at some point.  And then, of course, I will write about it, so stay tuned!

​Hugs all 'round