Enjoying Nature

This year has started off great. Mostly it's just been work, work, and more work. But it's ok, it's my own fault, I signed up for it. There's not always an opportunity for overtime, and while we're still young, we should pick it up once in a while if we can. But this week....This week, I have opted for my two days off like a normal person. So my first day off (a Tuesday), Ben asked his people at work if they would be okay with him going in early and getting off early and they said it was fine. You can all swoon now because he said it was to have more time to spend with me (awwwww). 

When he got home, we headed out. I had the cameras ready and a basic idea of our first destination. We recently found out we're about 15 miles from the coast. I know, I know... all you landlocked people are probably ready to throw tomatoes at us since we live in a state surrounded by water and just now (after almost a year of living in our house) realized how close we are to the water. Although to be fair, it's not really a beach 15 miles away. Or maybe we just haven't found it yet. If you want to go to a beach (a really nice beach), you still have to travel about an hour from our house. But we will keep looking on the stretch near us and maybe we will find a nice beach. 

Anyway, back on subject, there is a state park 15 miles from our house and I've been dying to go see what's over there. We got on one of the nature trails and our fingers are clicking away with tons of pictures. We got a few good ones. In January, although there's still a lot of green stuff in Florida, there's also a lot of dead stuff. Here's a few things we captured before the sun went down:

This picture (while horrible to look at) is a reminder to myself that i need to learn how to better focus on objects. The color is quite amazing if we could just figure out what we're looking at, haha.

It might be hard to tell, but this is of an intricate spider web. My objective was to actually get it in focus and zoom in on it, and if I was about 3 feet taller this picture may have turned out a bit better. This is a decent picture for being far away and short.

I liked how the sun was only on this tree yet everything around it was dark. Ben says the tree looks like a totem pole.

The park is filled with little benches. Most of the benches are facing overgrown bushes.

I like this picture because it makes you ask questions like "What is Ben doing??" and "What is wrong with that tree?"

(Said in game show host voice): And this is the part of the show where we like to ask, which one do you like most?

After the park, we decided to drive down the road and see if we could see the coast anywhere. We ended up at some sort of condo complex (gated) and the man at the entrance waved us in like he does every day (haha, I kept thinking how weird it was that he didn't ask us anything to allow us in). We really didn't know where we were going and didn't mean to end up at the condo complex, but it was in our favor because lo and behold, we were at the coast!!!!!  No beach, but there was a walkway where we got literally millions of pictures of the sunset. (I enjoy hyperbole every now and then)

beginning of sunset

A lot of birds also enjoying the sunset. They reminded me of the angels in the movie City of Angels, how they all stood there and watched as the sun set.

the moon is out!

Ben also took lots of pictures today and those will be posted probably in the next post. After the sunset, we went to Red Lobster because we had a gift card and we enjoyed an appetizer, our entrees, AND dessert! Well technically we had to bring the dessert home to enjoy it since our bellies would not expand any more to fit the dessert in while we were at the restaurant. If you ever go to Red Lobster and see the picture of the lobster pizza and think about getting it, DO IT! It's really good!! And super cheesy! We got the big chocolate chip cookie with chocolate "lava" on the inside for dessert. It came with vanilla ice cream, yummm!! Now that you're good and hungry, it's a good time to stop this post so you can go eat. Until next time...