High Tide and Candy Canes

Yesterday, I drove down to Anna Maria Island to visit Bernadette and to be her photographer. She wanted to send out some holiday personalized postcards! They turned out great! We brought Flat Olivia with us, so she got a chance to visit the Gulf of Mexico.

If you don't know about Flat Olivia: My niece, Olivia, has a pre-school project based on the books "Flat Stanley". So, all the kids sent their flat person out somewhere to experience something or somewhere. Then we send her teacher the pictures, and she puts them on this big map in the hallway at her school. It's pretty neat! I took Flat Olivia to Disney last month, and took her picture with Disney characters too. :)

ANYWAY...back to the "photo shoot"... We went out in the afternoon, so as we were walking down the beach, there were some places that we had wade in the water to get around the trees and rocks. This last hurricane season took a large amount of the beach away, and there are many places where the water comes right up to the tree/brush line. When we found our place, we saw that we weren't the only ones who thought it was a good day for a photo shoot. A little further up the beach, there was a photo shoot going on with very little clothing...we'll just leave it at that.

After we had some great shots, we decided to head back...and noticed the tide was coming in...higher and higher. All the places we had to wade in ankle deep water on our way out, was now knee deep water...and each time the waves came in - which was about every second - I was soaked to my waist!! Bernadette is lucky because of her 6 feet, about 5 feet of her is leg...so she was only soaked to her thighs.

We finally made it back, after scaling a retaining wall, and headed to dinner. Soaked. We went to Banana Cabana, and no one seemed to care - or notice - that my pants were soaking wet. After dinner, we stopped at a beachy tourist store so I could buy some lovely purple capri sweats for the ride home. ;)

All in all, a fabulous day! We had lots of fun.