Clearwater Beach

The causeway beach and Honeymoon Island beach are open. On this morning's walk, there were lots of people and lots of officers to ensure that people didn't clump up. It appeared that people were keeping their distance. We walked over 12 miles for the day. It was 75 degrees.

 

I took Dee Dee out this morning and our neighbor had this display outside celebrating their daughter's 23 birthday. What a sweet idea. It must be tough to be young and homebound with no one to celebrate with other than family. They did their best to make her feel special. Dee Dee was a little confused. "Where does the line start?"

We delayed our morning walk because I had to submit final grades. I waited until at least 12 hours had passed since the last plea from students. It was a huge relief to finish that task. It always feels like the semester is over once grades have been posted. Funny though, this time I did not have that sense of relief. I guess because the last 10 days have been so full of drama that I am numb, expecting the next blow. All semester endings are difficult, but this one was by far the worst one ever.

After lunch, we hopped on the Pinellas Trail and headed to Clearwater Beach. With hiring committee work, grading, and ending the semester, I've been working through the weekends, so I felt like I deserved to get away.  The Pinellas Trail parallels the coast, about a 1/4 mile or so inland. You can see the water at the end of this street as we passed by this intersection with the trail.

The trail south to Clearwater is really nice. It was partly shaded and 84 degrees. I wore a lightweight SPF long sleeve shirt. We both wore SPF on our faces.

Clearwater Beach was beautiful. Much different than when we saw it empty just a few days ago while we were still on lockdown.

It's 9.5 miles from our house to Pier 60, the heart of Clearwater Beach. It took us about 50 minutes. It's 6.5 miles to the outskirts of downtown Clearwater, about a mile across, and then 2.5 miles across the causeway. We were able to do the round trip in two hours without rushing. All total, we biked about 20 miles today.

We stopped at the top of the bridge to scope out the view. John's looking south towards Belleair.

This view is north towards Dunedin. We could see our familiar landmarks on the horizon, namely the Forbes and Elgin condominiums on the edge of Honeymoon Island.

I took this while cycling. The view down is nice. You can see the incline better in this view. The new bridge in Dunedin is going to have wide bike/pedestrian lanes like this. And pull-off lanes like above beside the traffic lanes. Our bridge will only have two lanes of traffic, not four, though.