Reminder: It's Summer!

Our son on the tube just off the coastline back in 2010

My hubby and I used to be avid boaters.  It is one of the reasons that we lived on the canal at our last house.  It afforded us access to the ocean.  We had many fun years as the kids were growing spending days out on the boat and even taking several trips down to The Florida Keys and over to the Bahamas for long weekends.  But like everything in life, things change.  Our kids became teenagers and spending a weekend day on the boat with their parents took a second seat to hitting the beach or shopping mall with friends.

So when we made this move miles from the coastline, we knew that in some way we still needed to be connected to the water.  Not in the sense of access to the ocean, just connected to some sort of body of water.  This is why we bought a house on a large lake or should I say, why we found this house more appealing than others.  It allowed us to perhaps keep our dingy.  Yep, a dingy.  Which for those of you who might not know what I am talking about, its an inflatable raft style boat that many boaters have on or tethered to their boats for mobility when docked in marinas.

We sold out boat, but we couldn't part with the dingy.  You see, the dingy was the center of many of our fun late weekend afternoons.  We would lower it into the canal, filled with a snack and a bottle of wine or pitcher of margaritas and crawl around the neighborhood canals.  I am sure that plenty of our neighbors got a kick out of us.  One neighbor use to say, "Hey there you are...the "canal rats!"



So yesterday after lunch out and picking up his Father's Day present, which was an electric motor for the dingy, we wheeled the dingy down to the lake for it's maiden voyage. 

We cruised around the lake, checking out a few of the houses that we looked at during our search to see if they had sold.  We saw several little turtles stick their heads up to look and dart down into the lake grasses.  We also saw several people fishing from their backyards.


We came upon this one man at the southern end of our lake sitting in his yard fishing.  As we approached his area, we over heard him call into the house to his wife and say, "Ya gotta come out here and see this boat!"  I guess canoes and kayaks are the norm.  An inflatable must be an unusual site.  


Oh well, I have never been a very mainstream normal kinda gal.  I'm not going to change it now.  We chuckled and motored on, but on our return past this fisherman, my eye caught something even more unusual than our dingy.  Check this out...

The Blue Heron looking like he is going to sit in the chair.

Look at the Blue Heron.  The big bird looks like he ran the man out of his chair and is intending on sitting down and taking a rest himself!  So I call out to the man, "Looks like you have a friend that is about to take your seat!"  He responds, "The only thing that big bird is looking for is the fish that I catch!"  He went onto to explain that we have three resident Blue Herons and that this particular one shows up whenever he is fishing hoping to get a hand out.  As we got closer, our dingy spooked the grand monster and he took off running.

Spooked bird taking a run for it.  

Guess this bird isn't use to such a watercraft in the lake as well!  I don't know if from the image you can get an idea of the size of this bird.  He would stand as high as my shoulder for sure.  I love seeing them fly.  It's such a loping, majestic glide.  Kinda 'lopey' like my hubby. Here he is captain of his ship on it's maiden lake voyage on his 18th Father's Day.

That smile is purely from happiness, the margaritas had nothing to do with it. (wink)  Hope you all had a wonderful weekend.  Remember, it's summer.  Time to slow it down a bit and enjoy the gifts around us.  Have you thought about how you are going to stop and reflect and just enjoy this summer? What simple thing do you have planned?  If not, get thinking about it! Life too short to spend your days unpacking boxes, err, doing chores, err fixing up that room.  Like I said...remember, it's summer...

-The End-