A friend of ours, invited us and 6 other people from our old stomping grounds at Sunnyside, to a day trip to Cabbage Key.  Cabbage Key is about a 25 mile trip from their house.  We had never actually visited Cabbage Key and we hadn’t seen the others in quite a while so we said “Count us in!”

It was a beautiful day, not to hot, not to windy and it was fun to get together with our old, I mean, our long term buddies, from the marina.

 It was her Birthday that day, lucky girl, she got to spend her special time with us :).

These were the two that helped Gary bring the Navigator back from Michigan.  Luckily, the waves were a little calmer today than when they crossed Lake Michigan.

The guy who was piloting the boat knows how to squat it just so, to make the dolphins play in his wake

Here they come!

One of them either spit at us or somehow splashed us, cause we got all wet.  You can see the salt drops on my lens.  Then they just kept jumping

and jumping

and jumping

We figure there was 4 or 5 of them.  One was even a baby.  I wasn’t quick enough to capture the little guy.  See the boat off in the distance?  He is wondering what is going on over here.

Hey dolphins, over here!

Once he figures it out, he is like “Man!  Quit hoggin all the dolphins.  We want some to follow our boat!”  Waa, Waa.  Suffer baby!  The like us better.  So much so that they followed us for a few miles.  Thanks for the fuel burn Chuck.  That was quite a show.

Well in no time at all we were at Cabbage Key.  This place was hoppin!  We had to wait a little bit so we could get a spot on the dock

All tied up, safe and sound.

You can see all the people that just pulled into their sandy shore.

Any port in a storm.

There is not much to do on this little island, a little restaurant, a water tower and some animals.  You wonder why everyone comes here?  Cause it is a fabulous day, that’s why!  The great little restaurant that we had lunch at, was super.  We did have to wait 20 minutes, I guess everyone came here for lunch ;).  The food was great and the prices reasonable.   When we were done with lunch, we decided to do a little exploring. We figured we’d check out the water tower first,

Here is the water tower for the best view on the island

that had a ginormous nest on it.

Big Bird’s nest

I went to the top of the water tower for a look around.  Hi Gary!

After we checked out the view, we decided to look at the animals they had on the island.  They had Tortoises!  And they named them!  They had about 4 pens but we could only

find this guy

I thought he was made out of bronzeuntil someone saw him blink :).  His name was 

I didn’t see any karate chops or pizza eating out of this Michaelangelo though.  (That was a test to see if your up on current cartoon characters)

After we were done exploring the island, we meandered back to the dock.  They have this boat hanging there. The boat is suspended from straps.  Kind of a different way to keep a boat, and a very nice boat it was.

We didn’t dally too long because people were floating out in the bay waiting for us to leave so they could have our spot.

On our way home, one of the Gary’s decided he had been too long without driving a boat, so he took us home

The other Gary

We were almost to Chuck’s canal and we saw this boat in a marina My Gary said it was a newer boat made to look old.  Even on a new boat they were working on the teak wood.

All in all it was a great day.  Everyone had a good time.  Another great day down in Florida…….wish you could have made it ;).