October 30th, 2023

If any of you are old enough, do you remember the old Doublemint Chewing Gum ads?  "Double your pleasure, Double your fun.....  Two Mints In One."?  Well similarly this post will be two hikes in one blog post!  Late last week I hiked on two consecutive days, once with Tim and once with Joy.  Both were awesome!   We will call these Photo Safaris the "Doublemint Hikes".  There was nothing minty about either by the way.

Tim likes to find new places to explore so we found ourselves at Weeden Island Preserve on Thursday.  It's an interesting place just on it's own and has been, at one time or another, a movie studio, an airport, a speakeasy (!!) and a private residence.  The crumbling remains of the tiny airport building is still there:

We heard loads of birds and actually saw quite a few:  Here is the list as best as we can both recall of the birds that we saw:

Osprey
Blue Jay
Gnat Catcher
Gold Warbler
Vulture
Mockingbird
Woodpecker
Hawk
Pelican
Ibis

This is the one bird picture that I actually got (sigh):

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There was a big tower to climb, so ofcourse we did.  From the top we could see, not only water, but three different cities:  Tampa, St Petersberg and Clearwater.  Very Cool:

There were, seemingly, miles of boardwalk through the mangroves, which are always amazing.  And along the way we saw some very cool stuff including a spider that was easily as big as my hand!  Somehow, no matter how I tried I couldn't get a photo of the spider but I got her reflection in the railing.   Did manage to capture a couple of photogenic lizards : )

And toward the end there was a big old gopher tortoise!  Awesome!

It was a terrific hike  and it's always fun to do something a little different.  

Of course there's nothing wrong with hiking a place we've been before either and that happened on Friday with Joy.  We headed back to Carlton Reserve and we were not disappointed.  The early morning light was beautiful.  Of course, it always is:

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And, as always, we found some pretty botanicals. The water drops were especially nice on some of them:

We saw so many dragonflies and butterflies.  And I actually miraculously captured few of them:

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And this hike, I even managed to get some birds!  Another miracle!

Two, Two, Two hikes in One!    And both of them were absolutely awesome!

Hope you enjoyed the Doublemint Hikes.  Get ready for a surprise post later this week!   I'm so excited I can hardly stand it)