Tuesday, February 21, 2006

What a Life!


I'm coming at ya from sunny Florida. OhMyGosh is this a beautiful place! It's overcast in the morning, but burns off by 9ish. We're in the cutest little town on the cutest little island. The boys are having a grand time. It was about 76 degrees today (sure beats the 12 degrees that we left behind us on Sunday!). Our flights here weren't the best -- delays, running for the connection, missing the connection, flying into a different city, driving for two hours, and finally, arriving at 1:30 in the morning.

It was so worth it.

Yesterday we swam and played at the beach, which by the way, has the most AMAZING shells EVER.



Then, today we drove down to Venice where they have a beach they nicknamed, "shark tooth beach". M saw a special on TV about it and I read up on it in my books about FLA. Evidently, this beach used to be underwater and home to bazillion sharks back in the day. We read that you can just walk along the beach and pick up fossilized shark teeth. Well, we had to get us some of that action. So, we drove an hour south to Venice. We got all our stuff out of the car, headed out to the beach, began looking. Nothing. The beach itself didn't look the way it did on TV. M asked a couple of natives walking by (you can tell they're natives by their leathery skin) and they told us the bad news: Hurricane Charlie tore up the beach, leaving nothing left. The city of Venice hauled in tons and tons of sand and the shark teeth have been really hard to find ever since then.

Bummer.

M didn't give up. We walked to the pier where I had read that you can rent sifters that allowed you to go into the water, dig down, and sift out the sand to reveal the fabulous black teeth. We got down to the pier only to find out that they were out of sifters.

Bummer.

M didn't give up. I took the kids to play in the water and he took the car to find a sifter. He came back with two collanders, which worked great. Before we arrived at the beach, I was praying that we'd find at least two so that each boy would have one. By this time in the day, I was praying that we'd find at least one tooth. We found 4! Yahoo! Success! We were sooo happy! I'll have to post some of the pictures of the teeth later on, but here's R sifting through the water.

4 comments:

CaliforniaGrammy said...

I'm so glad you are blogging while on vacation. What a great story . . . way to go M for being so persistent in finding a suitable sifter! Great pictures . . . looks like sum-sum-summer-time to me! Gorgeous! Continue having a great time, you truly deserve a break in weather!

SeattleS said...

What amazing weather! Looks like you are all having a ton of fun. Hey - what's going on with your sister? How come she's not writing anymore?!?!

jennavar said...

Wow!! That looks like a great break from the cold weather for you all. I'm sure the boys will definitely have fond memories of the trip. Way to go on finding the shark teeth!! Very cool!

Aunt Patty said...

Way to go, four shark teeth!! That water loooked good enough to walk right into. Great thinking M, colunders to find shark teeth. I'm thinking maybe you could make necklaces or something, that would be very cool. Pretty good find after Katrina did her thing on that beach.