On Sunday, Google Photos gave me a "Rediscover This Day" notification, showing pictures I'd taken exactly 6 years ago. On that day, my parents were visiting us, we went to a car museum, and we saw a big turtle crossing our yard:
Getting that notification was funny timing, because I planned on starting this blog post talking about October of last year, when my parents were visiting us (they rode the train from Arizona!), and we encountered a big turtle while on a walk around the neighborhood. We thought the turtle might be dead at first, because it was so motionless and it appeared to have an injured eye. But we did see it move, so it was alive:
Continuing chronologically, in February Wendy and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean. The ship's auditorium had a huge wrap-around screen, and one day we watched a video presentation about life in the Caribbean, which featured a segment on sea turtles.
I didn't know that sea turtles swim all the way across the Atlantic ocean, then all the way back, and that females find the same spot of beach they were born on to lay their eggs. You can watch a video of the segment here.
One of the stops in our cruise was the Dominican Republic, where we went to a monkey habitat and had squirrel monkeys sit on our heads! While we were there, I bought a wood carving of a sea turtle.
As I was checking out, a woman said she bought one just like it once, and hung it on a wall in her house. That's a good idea, but I didn't think to ask what she used to hang it up. So for now it sits near the turtle carving I bought at the Serpent Mound in Ohio.
Another stop during the cruise was St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where we rode a tram to the top of Paradise Point. On the way up, we talked to a couple who had just been snorkeling with sea turtles. If I had known that was an option, I might have done it! Here's the view from Paradise Point:
A few weeks after the cruise, I was reading the latest issue of the JSE (The Journal of Scientific Exploration -- I wrote about it long ago), and there was an article where the author proposed a cryptid (unknown) sea turtle as an explanation for the Loch Ness monster! Sea turtles match the existing data better than the usual explanation of plesiosaurs, because turtles are active in deep water, near the surface, and on land. I did not know there have been numerous sightings of the Loch Ness monster on land! The author proposes searching for the remains of egg nests along the beaches of the loch as a possible way to prove the theory.
Continuing right along, in April Wendy and I were walking around the neighborhood when we encountered a big turtle. I wondered if it was the same one I saw with my parents last fall, but it was so muddy I couldn't tell if it had the same damaged eye:
And finally, we reach today. This afternoon the remnants of tropical storm Cristobal arrived, bringing rain and strong winds, and causing the power in our house to flicker just enough to make all the electronics reset. As I waited for the internet router to boot up, I went downstairs and saw a big turtle crossing our yard!
Truly, 'tis the season of turtles!