Rick & Zena & Florida pt. 2

Zena, myself and Rick (left to right) in one of my favorite ways to take a photo, by means of holding it in front of yourself without looking through the view screen (there's now a digital camera on the market that has a view screen in front of the camera as well as in the back, but I think that takes the fun out of these kind of photos). This shot of the three of us was taken at Keating Beach, outside of Hollywood, Florida.
While we were at this beach on Sunday afternoon, there was a good amount of people there, but it wasn't wall to wall people. I managed to take this photo of the expanse of the ocean between people amassing on this part of the beach.
Myself and Rick (on the right, hamming it up in the typical Rick fashion) with our new friend outside of this Mexican restaurant we had lunch at along the beach called Mamacita's. It was fun to watch people going past us on the beach and at one point, two young gals stopped and danced in front of us to the music that was playing from the restaurant. I would love to live right by the beach (any beach would be fine by me).
Doesn't this photo just have Florida written all over it!?










Rick, Zena, and myself, had a fantastic afternoon at the beach, mostly walking along a great length of it alongside the ocean (Rick and I got in the water a bit, but mostly we were just enjoying a great long walk and chatting). After lunch as we walked back to the car, we discovered that this beach was having a Turkish festival and we watched a belly dancer for a while, which is not something one can do every day of the week (and is even more special when you just stumble into such a festival without knowing about it in advance).

During the week I was visiting Rick and Zena in Florida, Miami was holding their International Book Fair, which Rick and Zena had been to the previous two years. Rick and I went on Friday and the three of us went together on Saturday. Although Rick and Zena thought the Miami International Book Fair wasn't as big as the last two, I thought it was an excellent festival (well we all thought so, regardless of size differences from previous years) that had a great number of authors present giving presentations and doing signings, many varied book vendors, and also a big representation of some of the cartoonists who did some of my favorite fiction and nonfiction graphic novels from this past year. I'm going to do an in depth blog entry about this festival sometime next week, but for now I just want to state that if you're in Florida the second week of November next year, you have to go to Miami's Book Fair (as an added bonus, the temperature the whole week I was there was in the 80's).

Thanks Rick and Zena, Cali (their cat they adopted when they were in Nebraska), Spook (their other cat that they adopted when they lived in the Azores), and Florida for making my six day visit there such a wonderful, relaxing experience! And thanks to Spirit Airlines (an airline I'd never heard of before but got me to and from Florida in one piece) for not playing Frank Miller's Spirit movie on an endless loop (they didn't play it at all thankfully - not that they have movies on their plane at all)!