Thursday April 17th 2025

One of the things I enjoy doing on the Rambling Road Trip is taking pictures of the bigger wading birds. This winter as I’ve been enjoying life at my base camp, I haven’t found a good location for capturing images of these majestic creatures. Today I was wandering a good distance away from my base camp into one of my regular stopping areas on my rambling road trip. I stopped at the Tom Bennett County Park in Bradenton Florida to check for birds.

The water level in the various ponds was down, but the birds were there. First up was a flock of Ibis at the waters edge. They are very common, but still interesting to watch. My next bird I spotted was a Great Blue Heron standing among the weeds in the shallow water. Three other Blue Herons were in other ponds and areas. The final bird I took a picture of was an Egret.

Traffic getting to and from the west coast of the Florida peninsula was terrible. I saw several accidents on the interstates and had a hard braking event of my own to avoid am almost accident a few hundred yards in front of me. On the other end of the travel event spectrum there were a lot of periods of wall to wall cars moving at a crawl. I think most of the traffic is normal day to day traffic rather than holiday weekend related.