Tuesday 31 October- Halloween in America

Well at the crack of dawn (0900 hours actually, which is crack of dawn for us retired folk, we left Sarasota on the Interstate 75 going south to Sanibell which is north of Naples, Florida and is an area where the rich people live along with considerable wildlife, hence our visit.
We spent a couple of hours at the Tarpon Bay Nature Reserve which we visited earlier this year only to find that the birds were on vacation in England or somewhere, anyway there was not much wildlife about apart from a couple of birds.
So we headed North through miles and miles of new housing developments, some were Ok but others you wonder why they were built?. Some houses were built in the middle of a large field no doubt to await the arrival of other new houses, how horrible. But the amount of housing being built just in the small area we saw was incredible, I didn’t know there were so many trees in America.
The roads to Venice were the typical boulevard which went on for miles with malls, car breakers, cheap take-away restaurants and then the occasional expensive gated housing. We also saw housing developments for the over 55 years, so we could with a bit of luck get in there.
However after an hour or so we arrived in Venice, Florida and not like the real Venice in Italy however as it was Halloween night the local families were parading the streets and allowing their children to take advantage of the ‘trick and treat’ tactics. All the family seemed to get involved in this practise as yo can see from the photographs. We arrived a bit late for the event and we were luck with the timing as suddenly the heavens opened and it bucketed with rain. Out timing was good as we had just arrived back at the car.
We also came upon the shop selling Green Parrots, the relevance of this is only known to the close Groves family group of the 25 year old Green Parrot Club the home of Rover the invisible dog.

So we left Venice and headed North as it began to get dark, now that the clock has gone back its gets dark here around 1800 hrs. And so to bed….