Thursday 7th May

[07:45 US]

Awoke early, of course. UK time is still winning...for the moment. Linda mentioned that it's been a week since I left work. Odd feeling.

Had a quick look at the forecast.

Ouch !

We've discovered there's a trolley-bus that travels right along the gulf coast from south of us right up to Clearwater. So, after breakfast, we're going to give that a go. Now, where's my lotion...?

[19:34]

As it turned out, the forecast was pretty spot on. The sun shone all day and the temperature must have been in the 90's. We were saved a little by a slight breeze that kept us from baking.

The trolley-bus took us down to Clearwater. Here we wandered around the pier and soaked up the sun. The place wasn't busy really. However, there is still a lot of redevelopment work still ongoing. It was like that when we stayed at the Sea Captain back in 2007. It looks like it will still bo going on for a few more months yet.

As the heat increased, we retreated to the local ice-cream store. My Snickers/Chocco-Peanut-Butter ice cream was well received!

We decided to join the Sea Screamer trip that left at 12 noon. We had a really good dolphin encounter with three, maybe four jumping up with our boat as we swept through the surf. Even better - the spray kept us nice and cool.

We stopped off after the trip to get something to eat, then caught the bus back to Treasure Island. We then did our only bit of driving today when we popped to the local store to get some milk for our coffees. There's only so long you can put up with those small pots of 'milk' you get in the hotel rooms.

The temperature was still in the high 80's when we left our room once again and went down to the pool (which is just outside our hotel room actually) for a dip to cool off. This was quite a nice way to combat the afternoon heat.

Finally, after having changed out of our wet bathing costumes, we walked down to the beach to watch the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico.

Finally, we walked back to the hotel under the moonlight. The sound of the waves growing fainter as we walked. The sound of traffic growing stronger...