July 15th, 2021

Joy and I went hiking yesterday so today, of course, would be the Photo Safari Report!  I am calling this one, the Hike of Four Trails.  Because, instead of just doing one long hiking trails (or series of trails) we actually visited 4 different parks!  

We left extra early and drove about a half hour south to Port Charlotte and Ollie's Pond.  The last time we visted Ollie's, the water was very low and there wasn't much going on.  This time around, the water in the great pond was nice and high and you could hear birds everywhere around.  But the greenery has grown so high and thick that we could only actually see a small fraction of them.  That's ok.  We saw enough:

I captured a few pretty flowers, a dragonfly and of course the pond itself as well:

The most unusual part of Ollie's pond was a turtle that we saw. He appeared to be trapped in an overflow retainment pond.  We were worried about him so I looked up the Port Charlotte Parks department and emailed them about the poor turtle.  They actually contacted me today (how nice!) and explained that the turtle actually can get back out via an access under the path. Whew!  What a relief:

Poor Joy was being eaten alive by mosquitos so when we got back to the car, she applied copious amounts of bug bite cream followed by even more copious amounts of buy spray before we moved on to the Audubon- Pennington Preserve which is in the same town.

It's a completely different space.  It's sort of a peninsula surrounded by water and very very VERY green.  Not a lot of flowers or birds but other interesting things for sure.  It's very beautiful and peaceful, but a little swampy here and there and the muck we had to trek through proves it.  Ah well, sneakers are machine washable after all.  Here is a mish-mosh of pictures from Hike Two:

With wet feet and muddy shoes we got back in the car and headed north, back toward Venice.  And along the way we stopped at the Senator Bob Johnson Landing, more commonly know as Senator Bob Park. It's not very big but it does have the tremendous advantage of a large, clean, new bathroom.  Also a canoe launch and small, but pretty park.  Since we were there anyway, we stopped to take a few photos:

The last stop was the Rookery.  Not as many birds as usual though the water is higher, thank goodness, which means, other than by the bat houses (and they have quite the condo-complex of them now) which stink to high heaven, the rest of the area smells much better now.  When the water is low, dear lord, the smell could curl your hair.  For now, here are a couple of birds and a few flowers from yesterdays visit.

As always we had a great time, it was a very fun day and we look eagerly forward to next week.  Who knows where we will go or what we will do then!