Another AVA Walk in Naples

Well, we continue to have oustanding weather down here - it's been in the upper 70's to low 80's, mostly sunny, every day! This is SO different from last year, when we spent the whole month of December on Cedar Key-it was SO chilly for almost the entire month. There were many mornings when Brandi's water dish outside was frozen in the morning. But this year has been just unreal. We are SO happy that this year is off to such a better start.

My last post talked about doing my first AVA walk of the year, in Naples. Well, Naples actually has two walks, so I did the second one today. I liked it better than the first one, but two-thirds of it was still walking along residential streets. YES... I KNOW the houses are gorgeous, but I much more enjoyed the last third of the walk, which took me down a long boardwalk from Clam Pass Park (which is essentially a place to park your car) out to the beach. There were three trams that just run back and forth, taking people out to the beach - but NO, I did NOT jump onto the tram - I WALKED! Then I got to walk along the beach for a while before heading back to Gulf Shore Boulevard for more mansions and resorts. This walk is more on the north side of Naples (I think it might be in Naples Park), and it was kind of interesting because a lot of the layout is sort of Venetian in style, with houses and shops built out onto the water on big pylons (...is that spelled right?). The shops and stuff are fantastic, of course, and the landscaping is quite breathtaking. In fact, I had to kind of chuckle because the only people I really saw outside (other than me, of course) are the lawn maintenance guys. Now THAT is a career that must have a lot of job security down here - the grounds are always gorgeous and there are always, ALWAYS guys doing yard and ground work. Ah, how lovely it is to walk down a beautiful residential street with the sound of lawn mowers and weed wackers keeping you company. I'm posting a few pictures from the walk just to give my poor Northern friends a little taste of the sunsine and palm trees. When my walk was done, I had a nice chat with the gal who was working at the Ben and Jerry's (the "start point" for my walk today). She was telling me that right after the holidays the population down here is going to literally double, due to the inflooding of the "winter residents". She warned me to be "very defensive" about traffic when I'm walking in a couple weeks.

So what else have we done in the last couple days??? Well, on Sunday we kind of hung around and did some errands and made a brief visit to the Bluegrass Festival that was going on over in the historic section of the park. The festival was Saturday and Sunday, and I think some of the attendees camped in the park because Friday night and Saturday night we could hear the sound of fiddles and banjos wafting on the breeze. Monday we did some laundry while we waited for the Direct TV guy to come back and fix our satellite dish (for the last time, PLEASE!) and then we dumped the kayaks in and took a paddle downriver (as opposed to upriver, which we did a few days ago). Downriver is not as interesting as upriver because there are more houses, boats and the river widen outs. But we did spot a mother raccoon and her babies waddling along the bank, which was kind of fun.

Yesterday (Tuesday) we went for a road trip and drove down to Collier-Seminole State Park, which is down by Marco Island, to see if it might be someplace for us to stay in upcoming years. Well, it's a good thing we checked it out because it is definitely NOT someplace we would enjoy - it is way, WAY south of just about anything, right on the very edge of the Everglades. We do like our privacy and we like being out in "nature", but BOY this park is REALLY secluded. Great park for some people, but not us. We agreed that Koreshan, where we are now, is probably as far south as we need to go. After we left the state park, we drove out to Bonita Beach and checked out a couple of the public beaches, along with Lovers Key State Park. The state park was nice - I took Brandi for a 2-1/2 mile nature walk- but there's no camping or anything. But definitely a nice place to spend a day at the beach. We are planning on a full beach day pretty soon - we had Brandi with us on Tuesday so couldn't do very much beach time but definitely found a couple places we like for later.

Tonight I got a nice phone call from my very, VERY busy daughter - it was great to get a live up-date on everyone instead of just gleaning info from Facebook (...but thank God for Facebook!). I'm so proud of her and how great her bakery is doing - if anyone reading this has not visited her Facebook or website, do yourself a favor and take a look at Brenda's Cakes on Facebook or visit her website at brenscakes.com. But be careful - I think you can literally put on weight just looking at her beautiful cakes and cookies!!!! OK-that's it for today - I'll be back in a couple days.