Today was built around two activities that were very different. The first was a visit to Big Cat Rescue whose name says it all. They feed their 85 exotic cats once a day each morning and offer small group tours so visitors can see some of the cats as they are fed.  We saw a number of different types of large cats from lynx through black panthers, leopards and tigers while the tour guide and the keeper who was feeding them gave us the background on the cats and how they ended up at this center. As you can imagine, some of the animals’ histories are quite gruesome and they do not allow children under 10 to visit for that reason. There is a short video snippet of one of the tigers being fed on the map/video page.

After having my own breakfast I drove down to St. Petersburg to have fun driving a speedboat around Tampa Bay. Of course, they cannot allow non-boaters like me to dash around freely in a 30 knot (35 mph) speedboat  so the three tourist boats have to follow the group leader about 100 yards apart in line. Despite this it was a lot of fun because you were only just above the water and for most of the time we were at full throttle. There was a brisk breeze and I had no idea how rough it was riding a small craft over waves at this speed.  Unfortunately, I have effectively no video or photos from the activity because it was impossible to handle a camera while piloting the boat. For such activities I usually wear my sunglasses with a built-in camera which would have been perfect but, because I never used them on the previous perimeter trip, I did not bring them with me on this one.

After a couple of hours on the water I joined the Tampa Friday traffic and drove down the coast to Port Charlotte. If these places are unfamiliar then you can see the map/video here.

Some cat pictures and one very tame picture taken from the speedboat follow.