Living the Florida Life

The Florida life is a strange one. Maybe it's unfair to generalize too much, so at the very least Kirk's Florida life is a strange one. But we had a lot of fun living life with him. We did the usual cook, eat, and sleep. We hung out a lot with his dog Basic (who was named because he was just a "basic" dog). We went on a lot of walks around the neighborhood and on a few trails around the area. We explored. And we got to enjoy the good and the bad of Florida weather. What more could we ask for.


Little Florida Residents:

Trying to teach Basic new tricks.
Katie and I were mean and made Basic work for his treats :)

A little Florida lizard on Kirks back porch

Walks Around the Neighborhood: 

How you do a Florida walk with a spoiled dog

A friendly cat that was often out during our walks

One night we saw a double rainbow on our walk

We never made it to the beach at sunset, but we did have one night with a pretty awesome on one of our walks

Exploring the Florida Hiking Trails:

Katie reading about the De Soto Pointe

Kirk probably pointing out where he wants to live once he gets rich

The De Soto National Memorial trails had these comical cutouts of era-specific residents and explorers of the area

A pretty big cross on the De Soto trail

The view form atop a tower at the center of the Robinson Preserve
This was the hottest hike we did because there was very little shade. 

Taking a break on the shaded tower

This is from the third hike we did out to the Emerson Point Preserve.
And yes, I was taking my sun protection very seriously, so I brought an umbrella with me on all our hikes. For some reason they both teased me about it quite a bit.

Exploring Other Parts of Florida:

It had been several years since Katie had been to a Cheesecake Factory. So we stopped by since we were near one after one of our Top Golf visits. The verdict was that it was still very good, but it has gotten too expensive. Plus Katie's cheesecake making skills have vastly improved over the years and she can make them just a good as the pros. We won't be needing to go back again anytime soon.

Katie with her cheesecake

A few of the things we did were in Brandon, FL.
Katie was very weirded out by all the things with my name on it, but this bus felt particularly creepy.

The Storm:

We had lots of people wondering if we were affected at all by the tropical storm/hurricane that crossed over Florida while we were down there. I'm not sure what it ended up being officially categorized as, but they did name it Hermine. 

The storm didn't affect us too much. Kirk's place never lost power or had any problems with water. We did get to sit through several pretty intense storms and downpours of rain. But Katie and I love storms so it was pretty awesome to watch. At most it meant we stayed inside a bit more than we would have otherwise. Like I talked about earlier this post, we tried to go for a lot of walks, but heavy winds and rain were apparently a good enough excuse for Kirk to skip out on his exercise for a few days. 

The worst day for us ended up being the day we had to go pick up Kirk from the airport. A few of the streets near Kirk's place were flooded, but it wasn't anything Kirk's truck couldn't handle. So we just drove the truck around if it had been raining hard for awhile. The other slight annoyance was that they closed the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which was the easiest way to get to St. Pete. But that only happened on the second day and third day of the storm. Having it closed on the third day was the most annoying because the storm had calmed significantly, but yet they still kept the bridge closed for supposed high winds. All that meant though was that we couldn't go climbing when we were originally planning. Not a big deal.

It's hard to see, but it was raining crazy hard.
You can kind of see the slight flooding in the streets

A creek was forming in the backyard of Kirk's yard, but no gators were seen.

Braving the storm to get tacos