Day 43: Fort De Soto County Park.

Mila woke up this morning not a happy camper. Her tooth that is on the verge of busting through her bottom gum has really been bothering her. Here she is with tears and drool dripping out of her face at the same time.

It seems getting tucked inside her mama’s baby carrier is the cure for everything. And thankfully for us, it is the only full day we have here and we intend on checking out some sights. So in the ergo carrier she goes and we unhitched the van and drove down the street to check out the fort and hang out at the beach.

Fort De Soto is the furthest point out to see in the Tampa bay area. That’s why it is a perfect spot to build this Fort for the purpose of defending the bay. One of the main defenses in the fort are these 12 inch mortar guns that are mounted inside the fort walls. These guns are amazing pieces of machinery. It can launch a 100 lb steel shot over a 6 miles range. If you are on the receiving end of this ball of hurt, good luck and good night. It would pretty much demolish any floating apparatus. Fortunately for the bad guys, these boys have never been fired in battle. They have only been used during training exercises and it must have been quite the sight to see one of them go off.

These things are also the only ones of its kind in the United States. The only others in the world are mounted in the Philippines.

To propel the 100 lb ball of steel 6 miles out, it takes 65 lbs of gun powder. That is almost two Avas worth of gun powder.

Pretty much all of the rooms in the fort are used to store the ammunition fired by these cannons.

Steel shots, irons shots, fuses, gun powder filled these rooms at one time at Fort De Soto. Now they are just empty white concrete walls with a hints of urine smell in many of the deep corners of the room. I guess if you have to go, you have to go.

From atop the fort, you can see the 2 miles of beach at Fort De Soto that made it to the top of the best beach in America list back in 2005. Today however, the wind once again was blowing. We are starting to think that it is always this windy in Florida.

We found some concrete fort remains that are laid out on the beach near the fishing pier. It made for a perfect wind shelter so we can still spend our afternoon at the beach.

Looks like these concrete blocks were built using the sand right from the beach. If you look at the cross section, it is littered with seashells and sand dollars all throughout the concrete.

Well, guess what, we dug another big hole for Ava to disappear into.

And once again I found a piece of glass right on the beach near where we were walking barefooted.

“Mila! That’s not funny! I could have really gotten hurt! Aren’t your gums bothering you anyways?”

Baby Tylenol does wonders.

We made it back to the Airstream after a couple hours of being blown around at the fort and beach. We decided that we will try again tomorrow after we check out from the campground and just spend the afternoon at the beach before we head south. Winds are suppose to subside. We’ll see.

Since we left New Orleans about a week ago, we have been really craving beignets. On our last visit to Cafe Beignet in the French Quarter, we bought a couple of boxes of their beignet mix. I tried making it a few days ago but I did not have any flour for rolling out the dough. They turned out burnt on the outside and gooey on the inside. Not good eats.

Now I have everything I need, I was on the mission for redemption. Look at these babies, crisp and golden grown.

Covered with powdered sugar just they way they should be. How does it taste Ava?

I guess that means she liked it. Good eats.

Sorry Mila, no beignets for you. Just your two favorite fingers. I am happy though to see that your tooth is feeling better.

over and out,
dan