A day at the beach

Sorry to the one in their cubicle looking at this!

Yesterday was cold, windy and sunny… a perfect time to go to the beach! Personally, I think it’s always a good time to go to the beach, what are the alternatives, on a Wednesday, going back to work? Done that, enjoyed earning a living, now it is time to do the living part of life. 

The beach of our choice was Sunset Beach in Tarpon Spring, Florida. It’s a free beach, unlike most the other beaches where you have to pay for parking.

Even with the chill there were several people enjoying the day on (not in) the water. They were doing the kite-gliding-surfing-on-a-board thingy. They were wearing wetsuits… otherwise they would have needed to get a white straight jacket for being out on the water in those conditions brrrr.

We were parked right by the beach. We were enjoying looking at all kind of birds, with a clear view of the water, and also a little people watching… but for most part of the afternoon, we were just sitting in the truck reading (Note from Christiane: I was not watching the birds!  I was watching the kite surfers.  Some of them lifted a good 15 feet in the air!  That was amazing!  At one point, one surfer was in the water after falling flat on his belly from the air and another one surfed by so close, and on purpose I’m sure, that he drenched him some more.)

A couple of cars down, a lady came out of her car with a bag of bread crumb, for the birds…  She was immediately surrounded by hungry seagulls happy to get a free meal… PLEASE DON’T DO THAT!  The birds can feed themselves a proper diet (they are right by their food source).  They stay at the beach waiting for more free food and anyone thinking about having a picnic at the beach will have to shoo them away (and they can be really aggressive). Often people do that to amuse the kids, but in the end, the birds scare the kids when they try to eat their lunch. The birds poop all over the beach and when young kids play in the sand they might get all kinds of health issues. In Canada, we have places where snowbird don’t leave south anymore in winter because they get fed a lot… and we end up with beaches closing down because of the quality of the beach sand getting downgraded from the birds dropping. I also fed ducks in park and beaches, but that was before I was aware of the environmental issues. Just as an example, on our left there were 2 women sitting in a car having lunch, the seagulls were all over her car, once in a while she tried to shoo them away but they just stayed there and waited.  – End of rant