Time at the Beach - Indian Rocks Beach, that is!

The beach was great - sunny every day - no rain.

On Tuesday we drove up to Tarpon Springs which is about 20 miles north of Indian Rocks Beach.  This town is Greek and is known for its sponges.   About 70% of all sponges in the world come from the gulf outside Tarpon Springs.

We took a boat ride and saw how the sponges are retrieved from the water.

The diver is ready to go overboard here.  He has extra weights to take him to the bottom.

 At this point, he is under and searching for sponges.

 Coming back aboard the boat.

Actually, this is a representation of how they retrieve sponges,  In this case, the sponges have previously been planted in the water.  The real sponging happens out in the Gulf.

 After the boat ride, we walked thru the shops and ended up in the bakery for some sweets which were exceptionally good.  Emma had chocolate cake and Judy and I had baklava.

We also visited the John's Pass area (about 15 miles south) which has a lot of shops to browse thru.

And we did drive down to Pass a Grille which is a small town at the end of the St. Petersburg gulf.  Back in 1998-99 when we lived in Indian Rocks Beach, we would go down to Pass a Grille and look for shells.  The water was extremely clear and you could walk out a long way.  Then at some point they closed it to shelling for years, but this year it was back as a beach again - new sand and clear waters.  Unfortunately, we did not wear out suits so we couldn't go out very far at all.  We did find a few shells though.

On Friday, we had planned to take the majority of our stuff back to the RV so that we wouldn't have too much on Saturday when everyone wants to leave and there are no carts avaiable.  We got the truck all packed up only to find out that the truck wouldn't start.  Batteries are dead!!!  Call the road service and they come and start the truck - then I dirve over to the Ford dealer to get new batteries.  But we did finally get the stuff over to the RV and then went out for our last dinner at JD's (where else??).

On Saturday we checked out of the timeshare, got the RV hooked up and headed for home.  That night we stopped at  a nice campground near Chatahoochie, FL in the FL panhandle.  The next morning, Sunday, we headed out and got as far as Pensicola when one of the tires on the trailer blew out!

It was 98 degrees at the time!
Of course it took off part of the RV fender as well!

Called road service again and they came within a half hour and we got the spare on.  The spare was original (9 years old) and the RV tires were 4.5 years old and had been to Alaska twice.  So, the best option is to replace all 4 tires.  Now, to find a tire dealer open on Sunday, which we finally did.  Got 4 new Firestone tires and were on the road again in about 3 hours.

We actually made it to our planned campground for the night (after 6 PM) and got settled in.  On Monday we drove the rest of the way to Plano and are now home for a few weeks.

More later...