A lake near the entrance to Robinson Preserve

They opened a new nature preserve in Bradenton today, so I got myself up out of bed nice and early (and by early, I mean 8:00 AM.  This is Summer time, folks) and made my way over to the grand opening, and met up with a friend, Farrah.  It was quite the speech-giving occasion, with all the county commissioners there to give their own special insights about the preserve, which is pretty big and mightily awesome, but probably not worth quite as much lip-service as they gave it.

Anyways, they opened up the park, and it was a very pleasant place to be.  There were people all over the place (although the park was big, so they spread out nicely), many of whom I knew: even ran into my old English teacher.  I went mostly for the sake of photography, but ended up doing surprisingly little of it, and more just exploring the park.  To the right you’ll see a quick shot I made of the lake near the entrance.

One of the spiders in question

There were some booths set up with granola bars and water, which turned out massively handy, because I ate about three spoonfuls of yogurt on my way out the door that morning.  We ended up taking a wagon-ride back along the trails, and it dropped us off by the water.  Along a walkway, there were some nifty spiders setting up webs in the trees, so we stopped for a little spider-photographing fun.

Farrah, photographing one of the spiders in question

Of course, along with the spiders, I had to grab a shot of Farrah photographing the spiders.  Not a masterpiece by any means, but I think it gets the job done.  After that, we headed back to the cars, as Farrah had to leave.  I’d planned on heading up to the watch tower (they have a really, really tall watch tower) to try and make some landscapes with my old Kodak foldout (which I’m still battling light-leaks in), but it was a hot day, and I just didn’t have the will to go back out along the trails.  So I’ll save the tower for another day.  I’ll have to do some portraits in there sometime too, as there seem to be some excellent locations scattered throughout the park.