About two months ago we bought a nest box designed for Screech Owls. We got it from SCCF, and put it up in a tree in front of the house here on Dinkins Bayou on Sanibel. The first birds to come inspect it were the local woodpeckers, Pileated and Red-bellied, who climbed all over it and drummed […]
Since getting back in the fall we’ve had the full fall-early winter cycle: fall color, rain, snow, brouillard. Herewith a few images…. Clicking on one photo enlarges just that photo. Use the “View photos at SmugMug” link at the bottom to see the entire gallery. [smugmug url=”http://splobsterman.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=26947730_XgSzBW&format=rss200″ title=”In%20and%20around%20Gingins” description=”Fall%20and%20early%20winter%20in%20and%20around%20Gingins%2C%20Switzerland” imagecount=”100″ start=”1″ num=”20″ thumbsize=”Th” link=”lightbox” captions=”true” […]
Back here in Switzerland, in November and December, one of the unpleasant facts of life is what is called by the meteo people “stratus”. To you and me, that means a temparature inversion fog in the low-lying valleys running from Geneva all the way up towards Zurich. In local parlance, it’s called “stratus”, “brouillard”, […]
Tagged grisaille, Jura, lac léman, meteo suisse, stratus, SwitzerlandWe’re back, after 2168 miles, 21 April – 9 May for the return trip; 13 October – 9 May for the whole journey.
Tagged MaineWe started back north from Estero, Florida on the 21st, heading for St. Cloud, Florida, but with a night in a place called Lake Wales, Florida. Rather than blaze up I-75 (again) and across I-4 to Orlando, we went inland from Estero, north of Immokalee and north through Labelle. East of Estero the road passes […]
Tagged Assateague NWR, Darien, GA, grandchildren, NC, Sapelo Island, TarboroIt did produce some spectacular scenes, with the spray from the surf on Lac Léman breaking and freezing on everything in reach along the quais; a car in Versoix ended up coated with 2″ – 3″ of ice. 
We returned to Florida February 21, spent a few days with Ellen, then got back into the swing of our homeless, live-out-of-your-car existence (though in case you’re wondering, we haven’t spent a night IN the car yet…..).
…We’d rented a house for ten days, and discovered it was owned by a young guy who hadn’t the SLIGHTEST idea of how to make a place warm, welcoming or comfortable: it was living in one of those “Model Units” you see advertised outside dreadful housing developments: show-room furniture, inadequate selection of kitchen equipment, and less welcoming than many motel rooms we’ve been in. … Also, it’s spring, and the cypress are beginning to come back into leaf, which is a glorious sight; they are covered with that new pale, luminescent green foliage that trees get, and in the midst of the swamps and marshes, they really stand out.
We saw: Great Crested Flycatchers, many alligators (small and large), Green Herons, Tri-Color Herons, Roseate Spoonbills, Wood Storks.
Together with the Everglades National Park and a series of other areas under varying degrees of protection, the Preserve forms a critical part of the south Florida ecosystem.
…This satellite view from Google Maps shows fairly clearly what an island of preservation this are is, with the Corkscrew Regional Watershed zone just to its north (the Audubon Preserve is immediately south of that in the image, though it isn’t labelled on the map).
This image helps place it in context with all the other protected areas of South Florida (it is flag “A” in the image):
So, that’s it for Florida, for this year folks.
Then we got swept up in a busy summer in Maine: the beautiful, happy wedding of my niece Elisabeth Motley in Salem, Mass. last June, three high school reunions, a service in Massachusetts to celebrate the life of a young father and husband of Small Point friends who died much too young, and a golden September with as much time spent sailing as possible. … Just a few days before the Pfitzers set out on a 2-month trip around the world, Anke showed our house to a Belgian whose wife and two children would be joining him from the Philippines in August. … Not having quite believed that this would happen, we had taken advantage nevertheless of Border’s book store closing to buy maps and guidebooks, which Katie studied while Dan was away. … But there is the small matter of needing to get our car back to Maine in May, so the plan is to come back to Florida to hang out until it is warm enough to make the reverse journey further inland.
Tagged ChristmasSouth we went over the 7-mile bridge, past Henry Flagler’s magnificent old railroad bridge at Bahia Honda, past state parks and the signs warning of crossing the territory of the tiny and highly endangered key deer, and on to Whitehead Street, past the house where Hemingway lived and wrote between 1931 and 1942, until we reached the Route 1 Mile 0 marker in the heart of Key West 
two months and two days after leaving Rt. 1 in Maine on 13 October. Having heard and read so many stories about a rowdy city full of gay bars and kitch, we were quite astonished to find street after street of beautiful, bahamian-style houses and lush, tidy gardens. 
We went to the Blue Heaven restaurant because that’s what you do if you don’t actually stand in line at lunch time to visit the Hemingway house; you go to his favorite restaurant instead.
…Despite having just absorbed four or five thousand visitors, the port was a very pleasant place, and we lingered long enough to make a few purchases and check out a few boats in the yacht basin, one of which is the schooner Appledore we had first seen sailing out of Camden Harbor. 
…(We were in the car and couldn’t stop, so the photo is a bit blurry.) 
We didn’t try to park, but drove on behind a nice beach until we reached a small monument to those who had died of AIDS in the city.
From various points on the trip, here are some miscellaneous images. You can also see some videos from a couple of places here . 
At every turn there was something to see: gorgeous, if shy, tri-color herons, glossy ibis, a reddish egret along with several sizes of white ones, white pelicans, wood storks, roseate spoonbills, a marbled godwit, sleeping blue-winged teal, two bald eagles sharing a perch, a kingfisher and, last but not least, three sun-bathing alligators. This is the Florida it is hard not to love. 
Nightfall found us at Jupiter, where we walked into a small, riverside resort on Rte 1 and were given a huge room with two double beds at a very off-season rate. As we were a bit ahead of where we expected to be on Saturday, we decided to take a detour off 95 and drive into Fort Lauderdale to see why it was a spring break mecca. … It was a relief to find a quiet little resort on Key Largo 
and to know that the following morning would find us a our final southern destination: Kristin’s family condo on Marathon Key. 
And here we are most comfortably installed in this pretty apartment by a pool, with the ocean just a few steps beyond the neighboring building not quite two months after we left Sprague Road in Phippsburg, Me.