Gulf of Mexico – Leonberger Life

The focus of this blog is Leonbergers. However, sometimes I post about other things and today I am posting about our short vacation to Florida, to the St. Regis Longboat Key Resort in Sarasota to be specific. It was just for a few days. We were supposed to come home last night but the plane was more than five hours late due to the thunderstorm in the picture below, so we came home this morning. That is the reason I have not been posting since Wednesday, and I have mostly been missing from the blogosphere in other ways as well.

The photo shows buildings in the background, an angry storm cloud that seems to have eyes, and I included an arch in the photo. The arch looks like an angry mouth on the cloud. — This is the picture of the St. Regis Longboat Key Resort and the angry thunderstorm that delayed us. I used the arch on the pier to make the cloud look angry. Notice the eyes, the nose, and the angry mouth on the cloud.

Just a zoom in of the angry cloud picture. — Zoom in of picture above

A white and beige six story building with lighting above its roof. It looks like it is striking the building, but the lightning flash is really behind the building. — Soon after I took the previous photo I took this photo of lighting striking behind one of the buildings that is part of the resort.

Now a day whenever we go on vacation we have someone we know well and trust stay with our dog Rollo, in our house, and sleep with him during the night. This way that someone is house sitting for us too. It is safe, Rollo is taken care of, and it keeps potential burglars away. However, that does not mean that Rollo is happy when we leave.

A photo of our mini-Australian Shepherd Rollo. His face is sad. — Rollo does not like it when we leave, but he is well taken care of.

The photo shows a mini-Australian Shepherd standing behind a window looking out. — Rollo looks out his window seeing us leaving. He says goodbye Woof! Woof! Woof!

Photos of St. Regis Longboat Key Resort

Here are some photos of the resort.

Photos of the Gulf of Mexico

I swam in the Gulf of Mexico quite a bit. It was maybe a bit too warm, 86 degrees, or 30 degrees Celsius. That is not refreshing but certainly easy to jump into. One good thing with the Gulf of Mexico as compared to the Atlantic Ocean on the East coast of Florida (at least the place we’ve visited) was that there were hardly any Jellyfish or Zooids, the ones often called Portuguese Man of War. There were sting rays though.

The dark picture is of the Gulf of Mexico at night. You can see Venus and a thunderstorm cloud. We had one thunderstorm every day, which I have to say is a lot. In Texas we’ve had sunny and super-hot and sunny weather every day for almost two months, In Texas we have very severe thunderstorms in spring, but it seems like Florida has more medium sized thunderstorms pretty much every day in summer.

Photos of Florida Beers

The beers I drank were Luminescence from Florida Avenue Brewing Co. Jai Alai IPA from Cigar City Brewing. Unholy from Coppertail Brewing Co. Postcard Pils from Green Bench Brewing Co.

The Lagoon Adventure Feeding Sting Rays

The trip had two highlights for me, swimming in the Gulf of Mexico and snorkeling and feeding the sting rays in their Lagoon Pool. They had a large pool that looked like a little lake surrounded by rocks and parts of it were glass. I did not take good pictures. First of all, I took photos straight through the glass standing in front of the glass. As you may know the reflections in the glass will destroy the photo, something I did not think about until afterwards. I have included a couple of bad pictures as well as ChatGPT generated images of me feeding sting rays.

A black blob in water, which is a sting ray. — A very bad photo of a sting ray passing by. The photo was from above the water and through glass.

You can see lots of fish but there is also a lot of reflections resulting in a strange photo. — Fish in the lagoon pool. Photo taken through the glass resulting in bad reflections. You need to take these kind photos from a side angle.

Feeding the string rays was an amazing experience. The instructor had a big bucket of dead squid that we used to feed the sting rays. At first, I did it all wrong. I placed the squid right in front of the sting rays. However, sting rays have their mouth underneath their bodies, not in front. Not only did the sting rays not get any squid, the fish knew of this mistake and took advantage of the situation. They jumped to get the squid and also bit my fingers. They swallowed my fingers whole. It did not hurt. The fish had very small teeth.

In the pictures below the fish are not swallowing my fingers whole as they did in reality. However, it is against ChatGPT community standards to generate images with fish swallowing fingers. Don’t ask me why.

Four fish attacking my fingers and stealing the squid. The poor sting ray isn’t getting any. — Me feeding the sting rays the wrong way. The fish loved my mistake and went for my hands. I generated this picture with the help of ChatGPT.

Me standing in water reaching up to the sting rays mouth holding a squid in my hand. — Me feeding the sting rays the right way. My hand is underneath the sting ray so that the sting ray can get the squid.

I can add that the sting rays were very friendly and seemed to like to be petted and they came up to us, maybe hoping for more food. I can add that the sting rays as well as the fish were well fed. No one was starving.

Back home to Rollo

We arrived late early this morning and this is what we saw. Our house sitter had left but Rollo was standing in his window waiting for us. He was very happy to see us.