Just like in Willie Nelson’s famous song, “On the Road Again,” our exciting HG Travel Club is “goin’ places we’ve never been!”
On Tuesday morning June 16, 48 members of our club boarded our modern motor coach and headed North. Our first stop: The Tarpon Springs Heritage Museum. It’s hard to imagine that the indigenous Indians (the Timucua people) were actually living in that area over 3,000 years ago! They flourished due to the abundance of seafood in the nearby Gulf and wildlife in nearby forests. Tarpon Springs later because a resupply post for Spanish conquistadors, a warm wintering spot for wealthy Northerners and an economic home for Greek, Cuban, and Bahamian spongers and fishermen.
The next stop was the beautiful St. Nicholas (the patron saint of Greece) Greek Orthodox Cathedral, which has over 1,000 Greek families on its membership roll. Tarpon Springs has the highest concentration of Greeks in the US, due to its sponge industry. The paintings and stained glass in the church are absolutely beautiful!
After lunching in local restaurants on our own (Rhonda and I ate at a small family-owned restaurant close to the sponge docks called Niko’s, the grilled octopus tentacles were excellent!), we boarded an actual working sponge boat for the narrated tour of the bay. We were curious as the 20-year-old sponge diver donned his diving suit and hard hat for his demonstration dive. Many within our group had their photos taken with the diver. Down he went into the water with his sponge rake grab tool. He surfaced with a living sponge and brought it aboard for our inspection. Interestingly, the sponge that we normally see in shops, etc. is just the internal skeleton of the animal. Sponges naturally have layers of elastic skin covering the skeleton, and a gelatinous substance between the outer two layers. We got to touch this freshly harvested animal. The harvested sponges on the commercial boats are slowly dried in the sun to break apart the external skins, which are then removed. Then they are cleaned and sold to sponge brokers. And eventually for our purchase in shops.
We had a group dinner at the famous restaurant Dimitri’s. Seafood and Greek dishes were the specialties.
After a restful evening at the Hampton Inn in Tarpon Springs, we headed to the world-class Mote Aquarium in Sarasota.
This three-story aquarium filled venue is definitely worth a return trip! Our time here just definitely wasn’t long enough! The brand-new Mote building holds over 1 million gallons of marine aquarium exhibitions holding sharks, sea skates, manatees, fish, etc., even otters; the mission of the Mote is educational, and we saw lots of young summer camp age children looking excitedly at the animals. It was a joy to just watch the kids!
Lunch was on our own at a restaurant in the next-door University Town Center shopping mall. And afterwards, we stopped for Amish bakery items at the Der Dutchman Amish Restaurant in Sarasota. How can anyone leave here hungry, after looking at all of those carbs?? And then we returned to the Glen.
Why don’t you join us on our next excursion? Rhonda and I are investigating a one-day up-and-back trip in late July or early August to the Chihuly Stained Glass Museum/demonstration and James Museum of Western/Wildlife Art in St Petersburg. These details are being finalized now. Stay tuned in the Google Group for details and if you would like to be included on our email communication database, please email me at [email protected] or phone/text my cell at 636-541-4561.
