Vero Beach Weekend

Before the craziness of the holiday season kicked in we decided to take a little beach trip to Disney's Vero Beach Resort :).

 

It's about a 2 hour drive from home so we were able to head out after work and as soon as we woke up on Saturday morning - Maddy hit the beach. She is such a Florida baby! It was lovely just to watch her playing in the water...

  

 

We love u 2 Maddy...

 

 

Just up the street is Sebastian Inlet State Park - the second most visited state park in Florida. We were pretty excited to see the 'dangerous marine life' flag - but it was only for the jellyfish evidently, not one of those big scary squid-looking things or anything :(

 

 

There were tons of fishermen hustling on the pier for space. So this is where our lunch is actually coming from...:)

  

 

They were reeling in massive catches every few minutes - it was amazing. And not a relaxing pastime - these guys were making serious cash!

 

But my favorite thing to watch was the pelicans fighting for the discarded fish bits as the guy on the end of the pier gutted the catches. I could have watched them for hours:)

 

 

Full and happy :)

 

 

Vero Beach was the scene of a massive ship wreck in 1715. 11 ships from the Spanish Plate Fleet were lost carrying millions of dollars of cargo back from the New World. An estimated 1000 people died in the hurricane that took all but one ship and the 1500 survivors set up camp onshore and stayed to recover as much of the treasure as possible. Naturally pirates joined the party after not too long and the Spanish survivors took the native American Indian (Ais) locals  as slaves to speed up the diving effort. On the site of the survivors camp is a museum full of tales, treasure and more. It was completely fascinating.

 

 

Evidently there is an estimated $500 million still out there! To this day, bits of treasure still wash up from time to time and particularly after big storms. One woman found this bird worth $885K in 2010! Ssshhh...somebody's getting a metal detector for Christmas...;)

 

Anyway, we did find two trees that really like each other...

 

 

That night we made some s'mores back at the hotel...

 

And on the last day, we went to the Environmental Learning Center and saw some pretty impressive banana spiders...

 

 

And Mike touched a horseshoe crab...

...and he liked it...

 

 

Let the holiday madness begin!