Port Charolette, Punta Gorda, Sarasota FL 1-2011

First let me welcome our new followers, friends Ed and Johanne, and Paul and Sandy. We returned to Mayakka River State Park with our bikes. We wanted to ride some of the trails. We spotted a few gators and about ten osprays. That's Linda getting ahead of me. She dosen't know I'm using her to scare the gators, no not gator bait. Caught this ospray building his nest. We rode in a couple of miles till the road which was packed sand got to soft to ride on.

We took a ride to Port Charolette and Punta Gorda. We stoped at the Chamber of Commerence for some information.  Guess what! they have a book on mural that are around town. So we had some fun hunting them down. Below are a few of them.

The next day  we went to Sarrasota to visit the Ringling Museum. What a super tour. We visited the mansion called Ca d Zan-"House of John".It is a Venetian Gothic design. What a super place. It was hard to decide what pictures to use when we took hundreds.

One building houses the Howard Tibbals miniature circus. Its a replica of the Ringling Bros. and Bailey Circus from 1919 to 1938. It is the world's largest miniature circus in the world. There are 8 main tents, 152 wagons, 1300 circus performers and workers, over 800 animals, and 59 train cars. The first 2 pictures are from above looking down at the 3800 square foot display. Mr Tibbals took 50 years to build the display.  To put the display together at the museum it took over a year.  The next picture is looking in at the 3 ring circus. The next picture shows the detail of the mess hall, down to the plates and cups, etc. The next two pictures shows the Midway.  We only got to spend about a half hour at the Ringlings Museum of Art. This is a huge building with 21 galleries. We were told you need about 4 hours to tour it all. Boy were they wrong. We spent about 6 and a half hours, and could only rush through the art museum

The fish gods blessed Bob with a eight pound bass. This was caught in the small lake(large pond) at Toby's RV Resort in Arcadia.              

This last picture is Linda's new ride. We bought a 2011 HHR. Linda is the primary driver. We are trying to save the truck for a few more years of towing. It's a 2007 and a half, and we got 65,000 miles on it already. We have been checking our milage with the truck and found that for every 1000 miles of towing we put on 4-5000 miles touring. We decided to get something less expensive to operate to tour around in.