Quick Florida Weekend

As you can tell from the last post, Derek and I took a quick trip to Florida this past weekend. One of Derek's best friends, Brent, and his awesome wife Karin live in the St. Pete area, where they are currently in the residency phase of med school. Which means their lives are crazy busy. But they were awesome enough to work their schedules out so they had the weekend off to hangout with us. 

We flew into St. Pete on Friday morning and got there right around lunch time. Brent picked us up from the airport and we headed back to their house. Which is amazing. It sits right on the intercoastal and they have a dock with a little boat right in their backyard. Also, if you walk to the end of their street and cross the road, you're right on the beach. Probably takes less than 5 minutes to walk there. So you can probably guess what we spent the weekend doing.

First up was fishing on the dock in their back yard. Derek loves to fish, but we don't have any good spots close by, so it's something he doesn't get to do often. So we fished every day. If you look closely in the picture above you'll see a bird. That's Gary. Gary is Brent's friend, and has a pretty sweet set up. Whenever Brent catches a small fish, he'll feed it to Gary. He only feeds him 2-3 fish max when he is out there, but Gary can't complain. Every time we were out there fishing, Gary showed up.

A closer picture of Gary

Derek catching fish

There must be a lot of fish on the intercoastal because we caught tons all weekend. I even caught several every time I was out there. And by the last day I was baiting my own hook and everything! I never took the fish off the hook - I let that be Derek's job.

Also, funny little side story. We made a new bird friend on the last day, Roscoe. He's a pelican and must have noticed Gary's sweet set up. So on the last day he showed up. At first Gary squaked at him and warned him to stay away, but after Gary got a few fish he didn't mind Roscoe hanging around. We tried to feed Roscoe a couple fish but he was clumsy and couldn't catch them in his giant beak. So finally we just threw a fish onto the dock and Roscoe was able to get it.

Roscoe

So besides fishing, we ate a lot of really good food, went to the beach, went out on the boat, played putt-putt, ate ice cream, and spent a lot of time just hanging out. Some more photos from the weekend:

Derek loved driving the boat.

We saw a pirate ship.

We went to Oktoberfest and Brent got this hat. 

Karin and I competed in a stein carrying competition. Karin wore Brent's hat. I had random people cheering for me. It was lots of fun even though neither of us made it out of the first round. We blame it on the fact that we had to go first and didn't fully understand the rules.

After Oktoberfest was more fishing.

Brent's hat must have been lucky because he caught the biggest fish of the weekend while wearing it.

On Sunday we took the boat to a restaurant on the water called The Pub. This was the view from our table. There were TVs at the bar behind us so we ate lunch and watched the Bengals. Then we took the boat back to the house. 

We also spent some time at the beach, playing paddle ball, swimming, taking walks, etc. And the last night Derek and I went to the beach for the sunset, which you've already seen some pictures of, but I'll share a few more.

Overall it was a pretty perfect weekend. The weather was beautiful, it was great just being able to hang out with friends and not have any schedule or responsibilities. We loved catching up with Brent and Karin and wish that we got to hang out with them more often. We told them to block out this weekend next year, as we are planning on heading back and making this a yearly thing.