RVing and Nature in the Suburbs

For my still RVing friends...Saw this on Facebook, shared by Laurie Owens, and just had to share here...

Top 25 signs that you live in a RV! 

You might live in an RV if… 
1) Your GPS is your best friend! 
2) You NEVER know where items are in the grocery store. 
3) You dump your own sewage and it is no big deal.
4) Your family has to ask you where you are when they call.
5) You keep both winter and summer wardrobes because you don’t know where you will end up.
6) You know what snowbirds are and have seen them in their natural habitat.
7) Your HOME has wheels.
 You blog so that YOU will remember where you have been!
9) You look in your pantry and see that you have cereal from New Jersey, pasta from Texas, canned goods from Alabama and crackers from California.
10) You are always the new guy in town
11) You know where to find the best, most reliable internet.
12) You own very little and are proud of that!
13) You follow the warm weather.
14) You hang pictures and decoration on the wall with velcro.
15) You don’t own any figurines or other cutesy stuff that sits on countertops.
16) You have slept in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
17) You meet up with a family in Virginia that you met in California!
18) You remember friends by what state you met them in!
19) You grocery shop every three days because your refrigerator is so small.
20) You have been to more museums, aquariums, national parks, monuments and zoos than you can remember.
21) You have often “pulled chocks”.
22) You look confused when someone asks you “where are you from?”
23) You get your mail 2-3 weeks late regularly from your mail forwarding service. 
24) You have witnessed your toilet “burping” at you.
25) You crave adventure and can not wait to see what is around the next corner!

Guess I can blame #19 for going to the grocery so much! 

courtesy of the internet

Another update on the turtles, this time green sea turtles....Two years ago, only 19 green turtles nested on the beaches in the area. This year there were 104 turtle nests from Manasota Key to Anna Maria Island. Green sea turtles are having one of the best years ever as far as nesting goes and Sarasota County is the main spot for them. Cool! The east coast of Florida has an even higher concentration of green sea turtles...We have been to the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge south of Melbourne, FL, and so have many other blogging friends. The Carr refuge has more than 13,000 (!) green turtle nests this year!

Most sea turtles are listed as endangered, which means at the brink of becoming extinct and loggerheads are considered "threatened", which means they COULD becoming extinct in the near future.

Loggerheads are much more common than green turtles in Florida. Green turtles are larger than most turtle species, with an average weight of 350 pounds, and they have a very distinctive white underbelly. The green turtle nests look a lot different than the loggerhead nests, and have been compared to a grenade going off as far as how they look.

The volunteers who walk the beaches in the predawn hours looks for signs of hatched nests. Every hatched nest is excavated three days later to record the number of eggs and to look for little hatchlings that didn't make it out. Sparky wants to sign up for turtle patrol! But it means getting up at 5:00 AM, which is just a WEE bit early for her! And it's a very popular retiree volunteer project, they might not need any....the end of October is the end of turtle nesting season, so Sparky might sign up for next year....

And here's a bit of nature in our own backyard, so to speak...just down the street, a half block from our house, we saw this today....hanging out in the pond on our street....

Along with an anhinga, also called the "snakebird" or "American darter"....The females have brown necks...

If you get to close, the female will started posturing, hissing, and swelling her throat to scare you away....But Sparky was more interested in the gator, of course!

This gator was a lot bigger than little Gertie, who had been in the pond a couple of weeks before...Maybe this was her daddy or her mama!

Sparky just loves seeing these gators right in our very own neighborhood. No need to go to Myakka State Park to see the gators, we have 'em right here! Although Sparky still wants to visit the Deep Hole in Myakka. That's a two mile hike into the park interior and two miles back out on foot. She'll have to wait till November when it will be drier on the park grounds. Now, you'd have to swim to the hole, no thank you! (just kidding)...However, the park is severely flooded from the ten inches rain in two days this week so it will be awhile before Sparky heads over there...

And here's a pair of cranes right in our yard. They came within a couple of feet of Sparky, so she plopped down on the grass to get some photos..

This sandhill crane was trying to get some itchy feathers off his back....He's got one in his beak at the moment....

And that's all the nature in our neighborhood for today....See you down the road a bit......thanks for visiting with us now and then....