In and around Vero Beach

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One of the nice things about our condo here is that our second floor balcony looks over a small lake that is stocked with fish, and is teeming with birds. I love sitting out on the balcony watching the birds. We have both great blue herons and little blue herons, great egrets, snowy egrets, cattle egrets, ibis, various ducks, and lots more that I don't know the names of. There is even a bald eagle that takes a bath in the lake sometimes, but I haven't been able to catch it with the camera yet. We also have cormorants and anhingas (diving and swimming birds) that hang out fishing in the lake, then they hop up onto the fake geese to dry their wings out.

We caught a great blue heron with a fish that was too big for it to swallow easily. It walked around with the fish speared on it's beak, put it down on the grass for a while, picked it up again and got it head down, ready to swallow, then put it down again. This went on for a long time. I'm not sure if he ever ate the fish or gave up. We stopped watching after a while, and the bird was gone. But wow, this is what we get to see out our back window!

There is always live music somewhere, most every weekend. We went to listen to some jazz down at Fort Pierce. They play at a small park right close to the boat dock. The view is beautiful. And there were big schools of fish in the water, drawn there by people throwing bits of food into the water for them. They had whiskers, so I guess they were some kind of catfish. The seagulls were crazy, and they even dove down into the water to try to see if they could carry one of the fish off. The fish were too big, so they were safe. But fun to watch. It's a really nice way to spend half a day.

We are getting ready to fly to Europe on Monday. Orlando to Frankfurt is an 8 hour overnight flight. Then another hour or so flight to Prague. We will be travelling through Europe down the Danube river for two weeks. The weather says it is supposed to get a little colder and rain and snow. I hope they are wrong. Cloudy skies make for poor pictures. But, we will see. I will try to post pictures every few days as I can.

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