Dunedin Diary: 10 Square Miles

We walked over 16 miles today and biked 15 1/2. We were making up for our sedentary day yesterday because of the rain. It was beautiful today: high of 85, partly sunny, with a light breeze.

After we walked the causeway this morning, we had lunch. Then we set out on a research scavenger hunt, looking for sites to highlight for upcoming blogs. We got home just in time for dinner, but with no time to plan or cook, so we had our very first take-out dinner since the lock down. We opted for a burger at the Dunedin Golf Club, our favorite burger in the city.

The patio was taped off and all the tables and chairs had been removed, as if to make the point even more clear that there would be no loitering in groups to eat on the premises.

There goes my burger in the bicycle basket.

And that's my take-out burger.

The pictures below are just some things that caught my eye as we were cycling through the city. The city land mass is about 10 miles, roughly 5 miles of coast and about 2 miles inland. (That's almost twice the land mass of Key West.) There are about 37,000 people packed into this small space. (Key West has about 25,000 people.)

The city is bound by the Gulf of Mexico to the west, Clearwater to the south and east, and Palm Harbor to the north. The Pinellas Trail runs north to south with a 2.5 mile spur out to HoneyMoon Island over the causeway. The Trail makes it easy to get around on bike, but there are plenty of safe side streets to take to avoid the major east-west arteries such as 586 (Curlew) at the top and 580 (Main Street) in the middle. The locals refer to the streets by the numbers. The north-south major roads from the water to the east are Alt 19 (Bayshore Blvd.) CR1 (County Road 1), and Belcher. Further east and into Clearwater is Highway 19, a major north-south artery. We avoid that one.

This is the first rental house we stayed in back in 2017 when we first started considering Dunedin as a retirement destination. This house is on Wood Street, a few blocks from downtown. It's in the "green zone," meaning that homeowners can rent out their homes for short term rentals. Outside of the coveted green zone, the lease must be 3 months.

Layne's Lemonade (in the red railway car) is doing brisk business on the trail. The owner has a golden touch, it seems. This is not her first successful eating establishment. Management was having a tough time enforcing the 6-foot social distancing requirement in order to conform to COVID-19 regulations and stay open. People get hungry and forget. So they got a lot of reminders from the staff.