More Good Food

3/3 - We took a ride down to Bradenton to check out the Red Barn Flea Market. What a mob scene and this was Wednesday! Cannot imagine what it is like on weekends. The market is huge with a wide variety of stuff - we picked up a pizza cutter, some fishing tackle boxes for Dennis’ Mom’s costume jewelry, and a phone charger. After the flea market we back to Haslem’s bookstore int St Petersburg to pick up a book Nancy had ordered. Naturally Dennis bought a couple more books! We had lunch at Island Seafood right down the block. Outstanding seafood - don’t miss the Philly Fish Cheese Sandwich. Back in Sun City Center we stopped at Wal-Mart. We were looking at an inexpensive table for Dennis’ Mom’s new apartment since her table is to large. A lady approached us and said she had a small table and two chairs for sale. Turns out she has a cherry drop leaf table with two chairs that will be perfect for $100! Serendipity.

3/4 - Thursday morning we went to Brandon and shopped for a new twin bed and bedding for the new apartment. Had lunch at La Septima Cafe, just as good as last time. We had not expected to be back here, so it was a pleasant treat.

3/5 - We drove into Ybor City in the morning just to look around. Not much to see or do there, seems to be more of a nightlife area, lots of bars and a few historic buildings, but not much left of the real old Ybor City. Lunch at the Green Iguana, then back home.

3/6 - The Tampa Bay office of the National Weather Service is less than a mile down the road from Sun Lake RV. These are the folks that produce the NOAA weather reports for this area that you hear on your weather radio. They had an open house today, so we rode our bikes down there and took the tour. Pretty interesting stuff. They showed us the weather computers and told how they go about creating a forecast. They also demonstrated a launch of a weather balloon. They launch a balloon each day at 6 AM and & 7 PM (noon and midnight Greenwich Mean Time - now called Zulu Time.

Speaking of bikes, we have not gotten as much use out of them on this trip as we had thought. It turned out that there were no good places to ride near our campground in Tucson (same thing applies here in Florida) so we will most likely leave them at home next winter. Even with the cover on them on the rack they have gotten wet and rusty, Dennis’ more than Nancy’s for some reason. Do not recall if we mentioned it earlier in the blog, but we liked Desert Trails RV Park in Tucson so much that we have reserved the same spot for next winter, starting the 1st of December and running through the end of March. We will take the trailer down there after Thanksgiving and then fly home for Christmas. Hopefully that way we will avoid the snow and bad weather that we ran into by leaving after Christmas this winter.

In between our touristy activities we have been working on cleaning out Dennis’ Mom’s apartment and getting her ready to move into a smaller place. She is doing incredibly well in rehab and we are hoping to get her back into her own place by the end of March.