Stirling Park

Stirling Park is Dunedin's newest park. It used to be a par-3 course and driving range, but now it's a park and driving range, which sounds a bit dangerous, but there are huge nets to separate the driving range from the rest of the park. The new sign just went up this week.

This shot is of the driving range. As soon as the park officially opens, I'll share more photos of the walking part. It appears that it will follow the old golf cart trails with a few more paths thrown into the mix.

Dee Dee enjoyed her usual early morning walk (this time on the island), followed by her refusal to eat until after lunch around 1:30. She's had about a can of food so far. With some coaxing before bedtime, I'm hoping I can get her to eat at least another half can, so she will be at her average for the last 4 days. She's been about the same since Monday. Medicine and feeding time have become much less stressful since I came up with the turkey-wrapped-around-crushed-medicine-pills trick. Then the only challenge is getting her to eat, but it's less stressful because she doesn't have to eat on the 12-hour medicine schedule.

For mine and John's morning walk, we decided to stay off the causeway because it was so crowded this Saturday morning when we drove out to the island with Dee Dee. With Pinellas COVID-19 cases up 63% this week, we decided to play it safe. Florida has set records every day for the last several days.

So we walked from our house, over the Curlew Creek bridge, onto Curlew heading west. We stopped at the corner of Curlew and Bayshore to check in with our vet, getting an emergency referral in case we need it this weekend. Now, we have a number, name, and location of the nearby emergency vet. It's located in Palm Harbor, just a few blocks north on U.S. 19. Planning ahead is important because sometimes it's hard to think clearly in a crisis.

From the vet's, we took the Pinellas Trail south to Palm Blvd and then home. It was a nice 3-mile loop.

John needed to charge his bike battery, so we read until lunch. John suggested we have a picnic lunch, so we made sandwiches and headed north on the Pinellas Trail on our bikes. We found this nice-looking nook just past Publix right off the trail, before crossing the Alt. 19 bridge that separates Dunedin from Palm Harbor. The park, officially called the Pinellas Trailside Oasis, has great shade and there was a nice 8 mph breeze blowing. The trail provided the entertainment. It was 86 degrees but very comfortable. The Trailside Oasis is home to the Dunedin Tree Arboretum where you'll find 33 different varieties of flowering trees, each with an educational plaque showing the flower, benefits, how to select, threats, etc. Future plans are to include a conifer grove, hardwood forest, and a wetland forest.

After lunch, we rode downtown and then back home.

We got the idea to try other kinds of canned dog food, so we went to Publix and rounded up an assortment, hoping that Dee Dee will find something to her liking. This was a rare deviation from our COVID-19 habit of only shopping every 7-10 days. While we were there, we grabbed some fresh produce.

We still haven't ventured out to eat yet. We were going to wait and see how the re-opening went, and . . . that hasn't gone so well. We are both tired of eating in without a break, but we are going to keep doing it. We've only had one take-out meal from the Dunedin Golf Course Clubhouse since the lockdown began back in March.

John fixed baked sweet potatoes, salad, and bean burrito for dinner.

Dee Dee hung out below.

5.5 miles walking

8.2 miles biking