made it into tampa

We left Erik and Stacey's place on Monday afternoon... after the girls taped the pictures that they made for us on our windows! Thank you, Julia & Kayla!


We made it into Tampa by 5:30 that night. I met Jay's dad, Jimmy & then we made some dinner on the grill. Jimmy gave us a tour of his place, he showed us all of the amazing things he did, custom cabinets, lighthouse lamps, hockey helmets made into light fixtures and or course his cat, scrappy.
(Jimmy calls him scrappa dappa) he is a real mellow cat and seems like a dog in cat's clothing! Then Jay & Jimmy caught up on old times and photos... Jimmy has done everything in his life! It was fun getting stories that i've heard from Jay straight from the horses mouth!


The next day Jay was helping Jimmy work on his "hotrod". It's an 89 camaro and Jimmy just loves it. Jay was hoping to get the thing running, but to no avail. We wanted to rent a scan tool, but they don't rent them out down here... you have to buy them for $90. So we bought some fuses to see if that would help, but with the limited tools it just wasn't working out. But it was nice to see father & son working on the car together.

There is a Big Cat rescue about 4 miles away from Jimmy's place & there is a walking path called the Upper Tampa Bay Trail that you can take to get there, so Jay & i headed out to see the cats. The trail meanders along a swamp that is home to several alligators, ducks, turtles and heron. We wanted to see an alligator, but none were hanging out. bummer.
So we walked, and walked, and walked..... apparently it's quite a bit longer than 4 miles when you walk along the trail! We never made it to the big cats but we walked about 8 miles!
Along the path there was a ranch with horses eating in the field. I "clicked" to them, trying to call them over.... and one did! He stopped his eating and came right over to the fence to see what i was "clicking" about! funny...

The next day was beautiful! We wanted to go searching for alligators again, so Jimmy came along with us to see if we could see any.
We were walking along the edge of the swamp (the sides are very steep)and we were chatting, camera out but not really ready. Then Jimmy saw one! As he turned to tell us that there was a gator sitting there, the gator smacked himself into the water. We just got a quick glimpse of him before he swam away, but he was a biggin! About 10 feet long, and god knows how much he weighed....i was able to get some pics of him swimming away. Very cool. Glad we didn't get eaten!

We continued along the water, looking for more gators. We saw plenty of turtles and ducks and heron, but no more alligators.
We did see some unusual ducks, however... they had red masks on their faces like roosters. I started quacking at them.... and they came right out of the water, up the steep incline and right over to me! How strange! I'm like Dr. Doolittle!

When we got back to Jimmy's place, we played some darts. None of us have played in YEARS... but we all did surprisingly well! And it was a lot of fun! jay played jimmy and jimmy won, but just barely, a real close game...(jay says he let him win) and then jay and i played and it was neck and neck most of the game, we were both shooting for the bullseye and decided to eat dinner, so by default I WIN!! ha ha ha! it was a real good time and we are definitely getting a dart board when we return...

after dinner, we all hung out and watched a movie, Behind Enemy Lines, it was surprisingly good and it was nice to just chill out and spend some quiet quality time together.

the next day we got up and had some breakfast. after breakfast we started getting all of our stuff together, packing the cooler and getting ready to hit the road. this was a bittersweet moment as we were excited to see what was ahead for us, but we were having fun with jimmy (my favorite father-in-law) and was difficult for us to leave.
jimmy helped us pack our van, and then we all posed for pics in front of it and said our goodbyes. Upon leaving we both had a feeling of sadness, mixed with excitement, kind of an odd feeling, but we must travel on...