Girls Love Dirt

My father is evil.

I'm not sure if ya'll knew that or not, but I thought I should let you know. When he and his wife first mentioned coming down to Sarasota to visit them while they were on their Florida winter vacation, I was like... "... uhhh... I don't think I can do that... living on a student budget now and all." But from day they arrived he sent me text messages almost every day telling me how warm and sunny it was. "Beautiful day today. 26 and sunny". Meanwhile, I was trying to deal with my first full-time Canadian winter in three years. It was cold and snowy in Toronto and it didn't take too long before my fiscal responsibility protests melted away under the idea of a warm Florida sun. Of course, Kelly's offer of getting me to NYC for $5 was the first step that made my USA vacation possible.

And so, I found myself in Sarasota for 4 days. Here's a bit of what I saw:

(One of the beautiful bridges between Tampa and Sarasota)

A whole bunch of photos from Myakka River Sate Park:

We took the air boat tour of the river, which seemed like a great way to see some wildlife, but sadly high winds chased almost all the animals away. Well, except for this guy:

Wild Boar

Sunset on the golf course near Dad & Rosemarie's condo:

Posted by Grrrls Love Dirt at 1:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My love of flying is my most guilty unenvironmentally-friendly pleasure. I think I was almost as excited for my flights on this trip as I was for the places I was going.

Photos from February 17th's flight from NY's LaGuardia to Tampa, Florida.

Posted by Grrrls Love Dirt at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

...to bring you actual photos from the present.

That's right, I've taken advantage of reading week to go on a little trip through the USA. Part 1 of the trip is NYC. My lovely friend Kelly (yes, my Thailand and Hong Kong travel buddy) very kindly got me a bus ticket for next to nothing to the Big Apple and my four short day there turned out better than I could've possibly imagined.

The first set of photos were taken from the lovely hotel room I had the incredible good luck of crashing through a friend of a friend... First a night photo...

The next 4 are from the daytime view.

The hotel is at 44th and 7th, in case you were curious, and my location was the 49th floor.

Posted by Grrrls Love Dirt at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This walk is so lovely I did it a few times. Bray is a pretty little suburb of Dublin and easily accessible by train. There's an art gallery with a very yummy cafe and some cute shops and other ways of spending too many Euros, but the best part of Bray is the seaside and the long walk to Greystones.

There are two sets of photos in this entry. The first is from a walk I did with Sue-Li waaaaay back on Feb. 21st of 2008. (I wonder how many years its going to take me to finally post all the photos of my 3 years away!)

Part of the trail had been closed. We couldn't figure out why and so continued along the seaside path. When we saw this, the reason was suddenly quite clear:

This next set of pictures are from a sunny version of the walk. This time with Monika, Ashley (more of them here) and Peter. Somehow though, I managed to take no photos of people, just scenery.

Oh... and by the way. I said this was going to be a series about Dublin walks, but I forgot that I'd already posted the other walk way back here.

Posted by Grrrls Love Dirt at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)