Saturday, February 16, 2008

Respite



Since Marc's job as a baseball writer doesn't exactly align with that of the public school teacher (I sleep while he's covering a game, he's off from Oct.-Dec. while I'm off from June to August) we have a pretty limited window of chill time together. In honor of the last weekend before spring training, we headed south to Sanibel and Captiva Islands.


We both love traveling, but it's especially refreshing to go somewhere fun and beautiful and realize it's only 3 hours from home. We're pretty lucky to live in an area that's so close to so many great destinations. We spent Friday at Captiva, enjoying a very quiet beach and a decent meal at The Mucky Duck. Saturday was much more thrilling for me, as we spent at least five hours at the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel. The Refuge consists of mangrove swamps, woods, and coastline. There's an 8-mile wildlife drive that you can hike, bike, or drive and it is chock full of great animals and birds. We didn't catch any manatee action on this particular trip, but we did see plenty of pelicans, oyster-digging raccoons, and beautiful salmon-colored spoonbills.



We finished the day with a wonderful late lunch at The Island Cow (coconut grouper sandwich!) before we headed to Sarasota for an evening of microbrews and college basketball.


I'm so glad I found someone who shares the same love of packing up the car at the last minute and heading somewhere new. I have a hunch there will be lots of happy adventures in our future.


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