Tarpon Springs Port Day

This blog will chronicle our (Pat and Patty Anderson's)

cruising adventures on the Great Loop!

DAY 219 - November 6, 2017

We slept in a bit and had a "Sunday breakfast" on a Monday! We walked over to the Chamber Office to clarify a few things about the Jolley Trolley schedule and pickup point on the Sponge Docks, which was right across the street from the marina.The Jolly Trolley is only $2.50 for seniors for an all day pass that allows you to get on or off as many times as you want. So at 11:00 a.m., we got aboard the Jolley Trolley!

The Jolley Trolley

The Coastal Route runs through the communities of Tarpon Sorings, Crystal Beach, Palm Harbor, Ozona, Dunedin, and Clearwater, with a transfer to the Beach Route for Clearwater Beach. The trolley was far different than we thought it would be because the stops were not a few blocks apart but in some cases miles apart.  The trolleys run about half an hour apart instead of every ten or fifteen minutes. We thought we might get off at the Publix Supermarket, which is a regular stop, but we decided just to enjoy the ride!

 We had not gone into downtown Tarpon Springs because it is really too far to walk from the Sponge Docks. Tarpon Springs has a population of 24,000, and there were a number of places we might have enjoyed like the Cultural Center and several museums, but they we all closed on the days we were there. If we were going to get off and explore one community, it would have been Dunedin, which is a community of about 36,000 but has a central downtown that has a really small town feeling. The Lay Association of the Free Church of Scotland, through a company called the Otago Association, founded Dunedin at the head of Otago Harbour in 1848 as the principal town of its Scottish settlement. The name comes from Dùn Èideann, the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the Scottish capital. The Welcome to Dunedin sign and the City Hall prominently feature a piper! Clearwater is a larger city, with high rise buildings and a populations of about 115,000. Clearwater Beach looks like any resort town, with a Ron Jon Surf Shop and loads of small shops, restaurants, bars and hotels.  The trolley did not go into Ozona, but the rest of the route was essentially strip malls and fairly uninteresting.

We got back to the City Marina about 1:30 p.m. ready for lunch, so we walked over to Yianni's Greek Restaurant. We had the best gyros ever! The meat was ground lamb and beef, cooked on a vertical rotisserie and then sliced off in thin strips. Gyro means "turn," so it is essentially the same thing as doner kebap in Turkey. It was served with pita bread, onions, tomatoes and tzatziki. We had enough of the gyro meat left over for lunch the next day! This late, and filling, lunch presented a problem, since our reservations at Hellas were for 6:00 p.m. No way would we be ready to eat again at 6:00 p.m., so we changed our reservations to 8:00 p.m.

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking the entire length of the Sponge Docks on each side of the street! We poked our noses into many, many stores. Patty bought silk sponges for her pottery at Palm Creek in Arizona, some specialty lemon infused oilve oil, which is great over hummus, and small gifts for the grandchildren. I took a lot of photos of boats!

Typical retail display of sponges - we didn't buy any of these.

Specialty olive oils - we bouight the lemon infused olive oil in the middle.

Sponge boat on display in courtyard

The Tarpon Springs sponge boat

Anclote River tour boat

We walked back to the marina with a bit of time on our hands before our dinner reservations. There was a bird on the gunwale of a charter fishing boat, and the Dock Master said he had been feeding in the boat's live well!

Well fed bird on gunwale of charter fishing boat

I wrote and published my blog for yesterday, and then eventually it was time to head for Hellas Greek Restaurant.

Hellas Restaurant

We each started with the lemon soup called avgolemono and a glass of white wine. The avgolemono was delicious, and we may need to get a recipe and start making it at home. Then things went downhill! I had ordered slices of leg of spring lamb and Patty had ordered tiropita, which is an assortment of cheeses baked in filo dough. The waiter soon returned to tell me that he was sorry that they had run out of the slices of lamb, and I needed to choose something else. A Greek restaurant that allows itself to run out of lamb? Not good.  So I chose the assorted cold plate, with octopus, shrimp, peppers, olives,  tzatziki, and a scoop of  taramosalata, a Greek meze made from tarama, which is salted and cured fish roe, and a scoop of skordalia, which is a potato and garlic dip. The octopus, shrimp, peppers and olives were good, but unfortunately, the assorted cold plate did not come with pita, which left me wondering exactly what I was supposed to spread the tzatziki, taramosalat and skordalia on, since none of these seems like something you would eat without pita. Patty's tiropita was one huge piece, when she had been expecting individual rolls, the way they are served everywhere else she has had them. Maybe the whole experience was colored by how good Yiannis had been, but we will probably not be recommending Hellas. Your mileage may vary!

We have enjoyed our day and a half in Tarpon Springs a lot, and again are really glad we elected to come in and stay at the marina instead of anchoring out at Anclote Key as we had originally planned to do. Our Loop is really winding down now, and the end is bittersweet, as Patty says. The Florida weather beats the snow back in Washington State by a mile, but we are both ready to go home!