Around and About Naples

 Today we took two bike rides.  This morning's ride was about 20 miles - 8 miles into the city of Naples, then maybe 4 miles around the city, and 8 miles back.  We first peddled to the beach and found a pretty, white-sand public beach.  There were a goodly number of people sunning on the beach --

 -- but many more just walking around and sightseeing.  Just onshore from the beach are some spectacular houses peering through the palm trees:

Perhaps the most famous landmark at the beach is the Naples pier, from which the photos above were taken.  Lots of people strolled up and down the pier, and there was even a wedding:

From there, we cycled into Old Naples (sometimes called "Old Historic Naples").  For the life of us, we found nothing old or historic about it.  Mainly we saw crowds of people in extremely expensive restaurants.

We cycled over to the shopping district, fully expecting it to resemble the shopping districts in Boca Raton, Palm Beach, etc. - and it does.  However, we were surprised to find more reasonably priced restaurants, and most with very good food.  We picked Altins Cafe and Grill, on 5th Avenue.  It features brick oven pizza, although David had a chef salad and Kathy had a veggie wrap. 

We couldn't help noting and enjoying a special sign in the cafe's window:

We commented on it to one of the cafe staff, who told us that her daughter made it specially for the cafe.  We thought it added a personal, colorful and highly unique touch!

Riding back from Naples, we had a chance to photograph a mixed-use retail-commercial-residential development on the water, which resembled, to us, the sort of preplanned communities that one sees, for example, at Mt. Tremblant in Quebec (although this was on the water):

Our eyes were drawn to an unusual spectacle on the water.  We weren't sure at first what we were seeing, but realized eventually that it was a person wearing a jet pack, hanging and moving just above the water on a tether hooked to a boat following, with a jet ski attending alongside for safety:

As we biked back down the Tamiami Trail, we saw and couldn't resist a mini-golf center.  Here's Kathy showing her fierce competitive style:

 ...and David with his calm, cool, collected touch:

All in all, the ride was a lot of fun, but very warm from the sun.  When we got back to the campground, we took a swim to cool down, then had a quick dinner, and set out by bicycle again to the Eagle Lakes Community Park, about 4 miles from our campground.  It features a beautiful, natural lake and wildlife preserve.  Friends at the campground had told us that, at sunset, birds flock into the preserve to roost in the trees, and the the numbers of birds are breathtaking.

They were right.  We saw cormorants by the dozen, anhingas, heron, ibis, egrets, storks, not to mention a wide variety of smaller birds.  Here is a photo of some of the birds.  Note the cormorants in the naked trees in the left background, and all the birds swimming in the water in the left foreground:

Here is another photo of the cormorants, along with all kinds of white birds in the trees behind them:

As the sun went down, the birds and trees became silhouetted in a sepia sort of color which had tones of red, orange and blue.

The sunset itself was impressive:

...and another with more cormorants in yet more trees:

The moon happens to be near full and was rising as the sun set.  With clouds in the foreground, lit by the rosy sunset, the moon added its grace to the scene:

By the time sunset was past, the moon reigned gracefully over the palm trees and blessed the approaching night:

We set off home on our bicycles and it was dark before we reached our campground.