Venice Anyone?

Pulled away from what has become our daily routine of rearranging "stuff", we joined Larry and Gail for a drive west to Venice Beach, just south of Sarasota.  Here, see for yourself. Went to beach by X on lower left side of map from the X on the top right side of map.  About 78 miles.

Beautiful tree lined streets of Venice, Florida.












White sand and calm blue seas of the Gulf of Mexico.  A warm and perfect day.  Hey guys, wait for me.

Gail enjoying the sand between her toes.

I'm looking for toe nibblers, and sharks.

Bill doesn't want to get his toes wet.
Larry refused to get near the water.

Larry sitting safe up on the sand.

A pretty beach with neat tree tunnels heading back to the parking area.












Heading off to find Sharky's By The Pier for lunch, we stopped to talk to two guys we'd noticed snorkling about 100 yards down the beach.  They had underwater metal detectors and had found rings, car keys, earrings, wires, trash, etc. Amazing and looked like a lot of fun.

Donned in wetsuits and snorkels this guy and his buddy spent a couple of hours playing in the water and making money.

 Looks like we parked in the surf.










Working our way south by about 3 miles we passed a UPS delivery van....wait, that's no van...can you believe a UPS delivery golf cart!  This is a first.

All the packages in the tow trailer.  How cute is this.














We found Sharky's By The Pier.  This is a granite slab wall with water pouring down the front and sharks mounted on the front.  Much prettier in person than in this picture.


Venice Beach Pier.  Our table was right next to the palm tree on the left.
















When we arrived Gail saw this elderly lady sitting by herself and asked her if we could join her.  What a lovely lunch we had with her.  Her name is Marguerite and she's 93.  She graciously allowed us to all join her.

Yes Jimmy, it is a cheeseburger in paradise!

Now I have one funny story to share with you.  Our new rig has a convection microwave and no oven.  I'm a pretty traditional kitchen person with a preference and experience only with regular ovens.  So how hard can baking cookies in a convection oven be?  Well, I'll let the pictures below show you how it went.

So the directions didn't say anything about putting the cookies on a cookie sheet.

I peeked through the glass and my cookies had disappeared.

 Oh yeah, this is going to be fun to clean up.


Plop, plop, plop go my cookies into one big heap.






How about one huge cookie?  Sure smelled good baking.  Came out great, but in one piece.  I crumbled it all up, put it in a container, put it in the freezer and will sprinkle it over ice cream.  Pretty funny and fortunately not a total failure.

So that's it for today.  Tomorrow we hang out at the rig, put more things away and go to a Country Bluegrass Christmas music presentation at 7 tomorrow evening at the park community center.

Thanks for visiting, come back soon.