Another week at EG Simmons

On Friday things cooled off again so we decided to do a nice bike ride in the area.

We went out of the campground but the gate to Dickman Island Private Drive was closed so we biked around the block past Julie’s Fish House.

They serve all kinds of fried fish & shrimp outdoors on picnic tables. We may eat here on another day but today we we headed to Shell Point & Bahia Beach. We then found our way back into the private drive that we initially tried to enter. It’s easy to avoid the back gate on this hard packed sandy road.

At the Dickman Point I took a picture of Peggy looking at the St Petersburg skyline.

The zoom on my cell phone works pretty good, on this nice clear day. We biked back to the main gate and waited until a car came by to sneak out the gate and back into E.G. Simmons Park. This shortcut actually saves 5 miles of biking. After a ride around the park we biked back to our campsite. Overall it was a nice 15 mile ride in the cool 60^o weather.

The campground almost filled up this nice warm weekend. We paid for another week up to Super Bowl Sunday, we will probably stay beyond that.

They are now forecasting some cool weather for the first week in February, so on Sunday we decided to take a bike ride over to Apollo Beach where you can go to see the Manatees at the Viewing Area near the power station. Here is a 16 minute video produced by the power company that describes the area and the Manatees.

We found out that because of Covid the area was closed so we went over to the Apollo Beach Nature Preserve instead. It was a 17 mile round trip bike ride mostly on neighborhood roads with good bike lanes. When we were along the busy US41 we had a nice sidewalk to ride on.

This is Apollo Beach and the view of the power plant, but you can’t get anywhere near the manatees.

There is a beach access from the parking area and a large tower, you can see in Peggy’s picture below, that must provide some area views but we did not want to go up the crowded stairs.

It was a windy ride but the temperature was perfect for a long bike ride.

The storm arrived last night, 3/4” rain and Monday is cool and windy, a good day to do a Blog.