Fort DeSoto County Park

We started the week kayaking near Fort DeSoto with our friends Jeri Lynn and Rick. We found Birds! Surprise!

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An amazing shrinking Pelican!

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Below are the only pictures I managed to get of the few Dolphins we saw. Very cool, but hard to photograph!

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An Awesome Osprey!

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Great Egret:

After the kayak trip, we checked out Fort DeSoto… It’s not like I typically think of a fort. It’s basically a large berm along the shore, with some guns mounted behind it.

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There were several of these sets of guns, behind the shore they were designed to guard.

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Behind the gun sets were these stations that got aiming info from a lookout above the berm, and then posted it for the gunners.

The gunners would adjust the guns as required, and be able to shoot without being easily shot at.

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Following is a short video of the kayak trip and the beach in front of the fort. You can also see ruins of fort structures that erosion has taken “out to sea”.

Jetting across the country

We flew about as far across the country as possible, to see kids and grandkids…

I took a bit of video of our Grandkids on the Climbing Wall… If you aren’t familiar with this type of adventure, here is a short course… It is very challenging to climb anywhere using whatever holds you can get your hands or feet on. If that isn’t difficult enough, there are “rated” climbs, where you have to follow a certain route, only using holds of a certain color. Bouldering (shorter climbs without ropes), which shows first on the video, has difficulty ratings from V0 to V17. The ranges for regular rock climbing, are from 5.6 to 5.15, or from difficult to impossible! This short video features our grandkids doing some awesome climbing, including up the big 40 foot tall wall, and some random kids doing some impossible moves too! It runs at 4x speed, so think of all the muscle and energy it takes to complete these routes!