Pandemic Diaries Weeks #36 & #37

 23 November 2020

We visited Anastasia State Park, a really gorgeous park not even ten miles north of our little house.  The entire east coast of Anastasia Island seems to be beach, and Richard said that he remembered Anastasia Beach as being the prettiest beach in Florida.

Because it's a state park, there is an entrance fee.  There's also camping facilities, a pond or two for water activities, and a fishing pier.

As we waited in line to pay the entrance fee, a HUGE bird flew by, with a large fish in its talons!!!  I gasped and watched, camera in hand, so stunned I didn't even think to take a photo.  It was incredible, this majestic bird slowly flapping those giant wings, gripping a fish almost the length of the bird's body from beak to tail!

I turned to ask Richard if he saw it, and the man in the car next to us yelled, "That was an osprey!"  I had wondered if it was, and yes, that definitely was an osprey!  I saw a few more as I wandered around for the couple of hours we spent there, though I never did get a photo.

But it was such a special sight, I found a photo online and that's the first photo of this blog.  (Repeat, this is not my photo, it's from Fine Art America, by a professional photographer with a fancier camera than my little point-and-shoot.)

We drove in slowly, because there were signs to be careful of wildlife.  We saw several tortoises lumbering along the side of the road, and a couple of them seemed to have moss or lichen growing on their carapace.  Not sure if it was, but they definitely had greenery on the top of their shells!

The parking lots are near several raised boardwalks, roughly half to three-quarters of a mile long (about a kilometer or so), taking visitors over the wetlands full of birds, maybe some turtles, and hermit crabs.  I could see a few hermit crabs as I stopped to look into the wetlands.  

 

There were other park goers that day, and it was such a pretty day very few of us wore masks.  So I'd turn and look over the railing every time someone passed me walking the other way.

 

Along the way, I also saw the St. Augustine lighthouse in the distance, a very pretty zebra striped lighthouse.  It was about a mile away, but the island is pretty flat, so anything tall can easily be seen. This is a fairly old lighthouse built in 1871 to 1874 - this isn't the first lighthouse built here, but beach erosion caused damage to the first one so this second lighthouse was built further inland.

 

I saw a huge hole in the dunes, some animal's burrow.  The info sign said it's a gopher tortoise burrow, though other animals sometimes move in with the gopher tortoise.  Very cool!!! 

The boardwalk went up over the dunes - it's important to not walk on the dunes themselves, it displaces the sand and actually creates human-caused erosion of the dunes.  This not only damages the environment for the animals and plants that live on/in the dunes, but it diminishes the barrier that the dunes provide during storms, high tides, etc.  You can see how elevated this boardwalk is, allowing for waves that may wash over the dunes as well as sand accretion or erosion.

The beach was beautiful.  Truly gorgeous.  The sand in the dunes is white and powdery, and we were on the beach about a week or two after Tropical Storm Eta passed through and caused quite a bit of erosion.  So the actual beach isn't the white powdery sand right now, it's rougher beige sand, and sections are littered with gold and pinkish broken bits of seashells.  I'm not sure if this is the usual beach, or if this is the result of those large storm waves kicking up larger sediment onto the beach.

One section of the beach actually came to a bit of a cliff, where the waves may have undercut a small rise or something.  It was a bit odd, but again I suspect storm damage.

But it was a beautiful day, a trio of pelicans fly by as well as solo osprey, and I enjoyed an hour or so at the beach.

3 December 2020

The week just seems to have flown by, even though we didn't do much exciting.  The last exciting thing was the trip to Anastasia State Park.

But we had a nice romantic Thanksgiving Day for two.  Our menu was abbreviated so that it included only our favorite foods, and none of the items we are mediocre about.  Richard bought beautiful red and pink flowers, I lit candles, and we enjoyed our day and didn't worry about the fact that it was just the two of us, not a big family event.

That's my new policy for this crazy year of the pandemic - I'm embracing everything we DO have, rather than being sad or upset about what we don't have or can't do right now.  Sure, I'd love to be off travelling - but we're both over 60, so we're staying put in our cute little house.  Sure, we'd like to travel and celebrate holidays with family - but again, not the safest option for us or them, so we had a romantic dinner together rather than the big events we both had growing up in our families.

So in that vein of embracing the here and now, I decided to buy a few things that make life more comfortable and enjoyable, like 100% cotton jersey sheets for our bed.  Yes, our house is furnished with everything, including sheets and towels.  But I've always been the Princess and the Pea about sleeping - all conditions need to be perfect or I can't sleep.  I like all cotton sheets, and having discovered how wonderful jersey knit sheets are this summer, I decided to buy a set that we'll use during our six months here.  Well, down to five months, but still worth it.

I also splurged on dryer balls.  Most adorable dryer balls ever, little woolly penguin balls!!!  They make me happy to look at, they take the place of dryer sheets by reducing drying time and softening with the natural lanolin in the wool, they reduce static cling in your clothes, and they also help reduce waste and thus help the world.  (Plus the organizations selling these plant trees for each bag of dryer balls purchased!)  AND they are fair-trade items made in Nepal, of 100% New Zealand wool - so you know the sheep are happy and safely shaved.

 

They're available at www.friendsheepwool.com (where they have different animals and designs), though I bought mine from www.freetheocean.com - so the purchase helps the work they doing cleaning up the garbage and pollution in our oceans.  (shop here: https://shop.freetheocean.com/products/penguin-dryer-balls) 

 

Just look at those happy penguins - they almost make doing laundry fun!!!