Dinghy on the Rocks

This little dinghy just sat here all alone on these rocks with nothing else in sight. It just goes to show how trusting people are in northern New England.

The chain that's holding it isn't strong enough to keep someone from stealing it, yet it just sits there. In the big cities, it wouldn't last an hour, let alone for however long it's been there.

Cities have become unsafe to live in. I can remember as a kid my parents never locked the door, never locked the car, and we lived in a project. In those days, a project was a great place to grow up. There were always other kids to play with, activities planned for after school, weekends and school vacations at the community center. There was always something to do. In the summer it was play ball, roller skate and play outside; in the winter it was ice skating, sledding, snowball fights. What a different world we live in today.

We feared and respected our teachers, the police and our parents. Our mothers stayed at home and made us tole the line. If we got in trouble with our teacher, we not only got whacked by the teacher, our parents whacked us on top of it. Today, mothers are forced to work to make ends meet, and there are no activities for kids after school planned. We yell back at our teachers, our parents and have no respect for authority. When did all this happen? No wonder we're a mess!

Great Egret

We had yet another meetup yesterday and what a fun meetup it was!

We took a trolley tour throughout Tampa. There were 16 of us that started in Ybor City in Tampa. Some of the attendees wondered if we had an itinerary; but that was the beauty of the tour. There was no itinerary, we just bought day tickets (only $5) and rode the trolley until we saw a place where we wanted to get off. Then we'd shoot some photos at that place, grab another trolley and go somewhere else.

As stated, we began in Ybor City and rode to Channelside for our first stop. Channelside is a shopping and entertainment district in front of the Port of Tampa. We photographed that area for a while, then walked over to the Florida Aquarium, which is where I photographed this Great Egret outside the Aquarium in a swamp area.

We got back on another trolley and rode it toward the Tampa Convention Center, where we discovered the beautiful Embasy Suites Hotel. I asked permission to photograph there and it was granted. We all concentrated on the many lines and graphic possibilities when looking straight up from the lobby through the 20 floors to the top. From there, we went outside on one of the terraces where they have a lap pool and sun deck.

Once we had enough of the Embassy Suites, we hopped another trolley and headed back to Ybor City. There we went to the Green Iguana bar/restaurant for dinner. It was so much fun, we've decided to do this sort of thing on a monthly basis. I'll be posting more photos from this meetup as time goes on--if I ever get caught up on editing all the photos I've taken during the last week.