Spotted a lot of creatures while we were down in FLA last week. Ricky wasn’t with us on the trip, so no photos of him in this post. (Robby, feel free to stop reading now.)
From the terrace of our room on Captiva we
could see dolphins leaping. At least I could see them. I kept screaming out for Carol to “Look!” — but each time she did, the dolphins vanished. Very irritating habit of theirs. The pelicans were a lot easier to spot. And the weirdest bird I’ve ever seen up close — an egret, I’m guessing — sidled right up to me as I was reading on the dock just
outside our unit. He looked truly one-dimensional — like a cardboard cutout. There didn’t seem to be enough depth in his paper-thin sliver of a head and neck for a brain or any sort of vital organs.
I almost ran over a gigantic, very slow-moving turtle while I was riding my bike from one end of Captiva to the other, adding on a long strip of Sanibel Island for good measure. The turtle was
camped in the bike lane on a beautiful stretch of road with oceanfront mansions going by cutesy names like Daze Off, Mermaid Place, and
Margarita Villa. I kept kicking myself for not stopping to take his picture, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one. I also met Angus, a mellow 90-pound pit bull whose job was finding the sunniest spot on the floor in YOLO (You Only Live Once) Watersports on Andy Rosse Lane. Moments later, back on the beach, I was introduced to Angus’s polar opposite in terms of doggy bulk and energy: Flurry, an 11-pound manically curious Jack Russell terrier. (“Flurry as in snow flurry?” I asked her owner. “No, as in flurry of activity.”)
I also saw one mermaid and two lobster tails — the latter on a plate at the Mad Hatter, best restaurant we tried on the island.
The reason we were down in this neck of the woods was to visit our friends Mike and Leslie in Cape Coral — next door to Fort Myers — and to go with them to a Zac Brown Band concert in
Tampa. Always fanatical in my concert prep, I’d not only listened to my Zac Brown CDs nonstop for 10 days, but also googled the opening act — Sonia Leigh — and downloaded her music as well. Her CD, 1978 December, is ridiculously good — she sounds like a cross between Adele and Jennifer Nettles — and live, she was even better. Usually the warm-up act is when you go out to the concession stands for your beer, but Sonia had the crowd at the 1-800-ASK-GARY Amphitheatre (classic name, huh? Right up there with Fillmore East) rockin’. Groupie that I am, I waited on line after her set to get an autographed CD and a photo.
A quick word about the title of this post. I’ve wanted, forever, to submit a cartoon to The New Yorker. It would depict, if I could only draw, a shallow pool of water with a flock of extremely long-legged, long-necked birds. The caption would read: “Egrets only.”
I’m fanatical about concert prep too. It’s annoying how often these days a band will start their tour the day an album comes out. Luckily DC is usually a few stops down the line, or I’d never have the time to hear the new material before the show.