The Rest of the Trip

This was actually supposed to go out on Monday, but Blogger was not letting me uplaod photos for the past couple of days!


Saturday morning I met up with my buddy FC and had breakfast at Bill's BBQ. I know, "BBQ for Breakfast?", but they have a real breakfast with home made sausage, grits, and eggs; and it was good! After that we headed out to the property walked around a little, checked out the sink hole a ibt for depth, etc, then headed back into town so FC could get some stuff done before JR's graduation (Congratulations JR!).
We didn't see much except for this evidence that there's gonna be a pig roast comin' up soon!
















With my work completed I now had some time to hang out with the locals that will soon be our neighbors. I had heard that there was going to be a benefit ride for Cystic Fibrosis that was going to end up at a place I've visited before the "Brick Grill". They have good sandwiches, wings, burgers, and fried green beans. Anyway, I headed up there and spent some time checkin' out the bikes and listenin' to the band. It was hot, hotter than normal for Florida even (100F actual temp), but it was fun!

Here's a few of the bikes I saw:
Those are gator skin seats!
A customized "Rocker"
Custom chopper















After that I headed out to Cedar Key to get some of Tony's now world famous clam chowder. It was awesome, as usual, and I ordered some of it to ship back home; it should be here Wednesday, yumm!
I had selfish reasons for ordering it to ship though because the disaster still swelling in the Gulf is headed that way! I heard that they are going to open scallop season early just so they can get one last harvest in before they get wiped out! After hearing this I found myself just sitting at the end of the pier of Coconuts staring out at the water and the islands and thinking how absolutely beautiful this area is and how tragic this loss is going to be!

Here's just a few things that will likely be missing the next time I come down:

Oyster beds

Mangroves


Oyster beds around the islands; the clam beds are submerged by the tide here, but they'll be gone too! The wading birds, herons etc. (not pictured here) will be gone and the list goes on and on! It makes my stomach turn every time I think about it!


From there I headed east to Jacksonville to meet up with my good friend Jesse, who I met while we were both living in China. He showed me around town and we stopped in as his favorite Irish pub, Lynch's Pub. Good food and good beer, plus some unexpected entertainment. I can't really describe the interesting thing that happened, but it was as if a tornado blew past us in the form of a tiny, phsyco-evil little blonde. Jesse summed it up best as a DBV (Drive By Verbal). Now she wasn't angry or evil at us, she just for some reason thought Jesse and I needed to hear what she had to say and it was strange, angry, intimidating, racist, and wrong on so many levels and yet strangely entertaining because it came out of nowhere!


Here's one of the bridges on the way to the beach

Believe it or not this is one oak tree

This is the Jesse Ball DuPont Treaty Oak, and it's huge and amazing! The branches bent down and went into the ground and sprouted new branches from there. JBD was one the first actual tree hugging environmentalist because she bought this land that is now a park just to preserve this tree when Jacksonville was becoming urbanized!

It was a little dark so I also tried a couple with the night vision, but they came out a little blurred
















After that it was back to the hotel so I could at least get a couple of hours sleep before I caught the 5:45am "red-eye" back here this morning.

I'm not sure when I'll be headed back there next, but I'll be running down and back a few more times while the house is getting built!