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Archive for the 'Palm Harbor' Category

Annual Parrot Head party comes to downtown Palm Harbor

Parrothead crowd in Old Palm Harbor

Somewhere around 15,000 Parrotheads turned out in downtown Palm Harbor Saturday to chill out, sip a few cold ones, and enjoy the style of music made famous by the likes of Jimmy Buffet.

Jimmy himself didn’t show up, but the Carribbean Chillers did, and the Jimmy Buffet tribune band put out a Buffet-style sound that had the crowd up and dancing in the street.

Florida Avenue, downtown Palm Harbor’s main drag, was blocked off for the day-long program, which started at around 2 p.m. amd went deep into the night.

As you might expect, there were plenty of loud shirts, parrot headresses and fat cigars. And the beer flowed, as you would expect from a crowd like this and an event sponsored in large part by Budweiser.

More than 30 vendors were on hand, selling everything from food items to t-shirts to parrot-themed products of one kind or another.

The event, officially known as the Palm Harbor Parrot Head Party, is the biggest fundraiser of the year for Old Palm Harbor Main Street, the group of downtown merchants and others who promote the historic district near Alt. 19.

It has grown every year for the past several years, which makes the sponsors happy in spite of the fact that sponsorship costs have gone up steeply as it becomes more difficult in a slow economy to find people to put up sponsorship dollars.

This was the eighth annual Parrot Head party in downtown Palm Harbor. See more pictures here.

Tags: Palm Harbor, parrothead, real estate

Palm Harbor’s Ahern’s Ice Cream

Ahern's Ice Cream

When we first moved to Palm Harbor from Maine in 1993, one thing we looked forward to was a whole new world of ice cream shops. We figured that Florida, being a hot and outdoorsy kind of place, would be a great place for ice cream.

As it turned out, we were a little disappointed. The ice cream we found was pretty good most of the time, but there just wasn’t all that much to choose from, and we found that to be a little surprising.

Later, I read somewhere that New England, a place with long, cold winters,  was one of the most popular places in the country for ice cream. Who would have guessed that?

Anyway, we did manage to find some good ice cream places, and the longer we live here the more we see new ice cream places opening up. When that happens, we fall all over ourselves going to the new place and trying out the ice cream.

Yep, that's me, windowing-shopping the ice cream

One of the newest around here is Ahern’s Ice Cream, located in Palm Harbor on Alternate 19 just south of Alderman. We’ve been there a couple of times recently, and we like the ice cream as well as the people who work there. We spent one visit talking to the owner (and eating ice cream, of course), and we spent the next visit eating ice cream and talking to the very nice young woman behind the counter. She goes to St. Petersburg College and drives a very funky red 1970 Volkswagen bug, which was parked outside.

One thing that’s interesting about Ahern’s is that it sells ice cream made over in Tampa by Old Meeting House Ice Cream, a small, independently owned and operated ice cream business that has been making and selling ice cream since 1947. Old Meeting House still makes ice cream in small batches by hand, just as it did when it started out in the ice cream biz 61 years ago.

Ahern’s (and Old Meeting House) definitely passes our critical Ice Cream Test.

Tags: ice cream, Palm Harbor, pinellas county

A garden of golf clubs in Palm Harbor

Ron Wicks of Palm Harbor has lived around golf for many years, giving lessons and building custom clubs for pro players. He’s retired now, but he still makes a few extra dollars by selling clubs on the lawn in front of his house on Nebraska Avenue.

Tags: Add new tag, golf, Palm Harbor

Old Town Cafe in Old Palm Harbor

Old Town Cafe in Old Palm Harbor

We’ve written a fair amount about Old Palm Harbor, the historical section of Palm Harbor in the Florida Avenue area of town, near Alternate 19. It was the site of the recent Palm Harbor Citrus Festival, and it hosts a number of street fairs and art shows throughout the year.

One place we like there is the Old Town Cafe, which is at 1019 Florida Ave. This is a very casual and laid-back place that invites lingering over a cup of coffee or a beer, maybe some gelato or a light lunch.

Owner Dan Kauffman has put together a very nice ambiance at Old Town Cafe, with an outside deck and an inviting interior. They serve Baby’s Coffee from Key West, and while the are open until 9 p.m. ( 4 p.m. on weekends), the food is more breakfast and lunch — paninis, bagels and croissants for breakfast, sandwiches, salads, paninis and Cuban sandwiches for lunch and dinner.

Dan at Old Town Cafe

If you care about the environment, Old Town Cafe lets you know theycare, too — cups, straws and bags are made of corn, to-go boxes are made of sugar cane.

This is the kind of place where you take your morning newspaper and then linger over a good cup of coffee and a light meal. Take your time and enjoy — no one will rush you here.

Tags: old town cafe, Palm Harbor

Mystic Fish in Palm Harbor wins award

Mystic Fish

One of our favorite local restaurants, Mystic Fish on Tampa Road in Palm Harbor, has won Best Overall and Best Use of Ingredient at the All Childrens Iron Chef Challenge at the Renaissance Hotel Tampa. It’s the second year in a row that Mystic Fish has won that honor. The winning dish was Steamed Maine Lobster with Spicy Slaw and orange -Apricot Curry Sauce and Togorashi Shrimp with Orange Marmalade brushed Bacon and Blood Orange Sabayon.

To learn more, go to their website — www.3bestchefs.com/mystic. To see our review of Mystic Fish, look over to the right of this page and click on “restaurant reviews” under “Local Resources.”

Tags: Add new tag, Palm Harbor, restaurants

Showing the Palm Harbor Library colors

Palm Harbor library

Here in Palm Harbor, we are pretty proud of our library.
Palm Harbor is in an unincorporated part of Pinellas County. That means there are no local funds available for such things as libraries. But we make due with funding from the county, and we find other sources of funding when we need them.
Case in point; a few years ago there was a lot of support for upgrades and modernizations for the library.  So library supporters got together and found more than a million dollars for a library upgrade project — $500,000 from the state, $247,500 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, $500,000 in local matching funds and $100,000 that was raised by the Friends of the Library.
The result was an upgraded parking lot, a new community room and new restrooms, as well as a much-improved teen room. There is also several new study rooms and a new conference room.
While other libraries in the county (and elsewhere) are cutting back and trying to figure out how to keep the doors open, the Palm Harbor Library is going strong.
Several library workers and supporters were on hand at the Palm Harbor Citrus Festival this weekend just to “show the colors” and make sure people in the community remember that their library is an important community resource.

Tags: citrus festival, library, Palm Harbor

Palm Harbor Citrus Festival

We just got back from spending a little time at the Palm Harbor Citrus Festival, the latest effort to pump up the Old Palm Harbor downtown section, located right off Alt. 19.

This is the first year of the Citrus Festival, which celebrates Palm Harbor’s history as a major citrus growing region.  Actually, that history doesen’t really hark back that far — Palm Harbor was still hosting large tracts of citrus growing land right up through the 1970s and 1980s. Earlier than that, citrus fruit is what built and sustained  this northern part of Pinellas County.

We got to the Festival a bit early on Saturday morning, so there weren’t too many people milling around. But exhibitors were setting up their booths, and carnival workers  were just showing up to get their rides going. There were a number of food booths, including one interesting-looking barbecue outfit that just might draw me back there at mid-day for lunch.

The Downtown Palm Harbor merchants really do a good job of trying to pump up their region. They do a great and very well-know arts show arounf the holiday season, and the annual Taste of Palm Harbor event is very popular. They even sponsor an annual motorcycle event.

You can see more pictures of the Citrus Festival at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bethfrederick/sets/72157617209915435/

Tags: citrus festival, downtown, Palm Harbor

Al Boyd’s boot

It wasn’t so long ago that North Pinellas County was little more than orange groves and open land. Because of that, the area isn’t exactly chock full of old stories and legends. But there is a pretty good story involving Boot Ranch. Boot Ranch is now a shopping center, but it used to be a good-sized ranch that was owned by one Al Boyd.

Al Boyd's boot

Since Al called his spread Boot Ranch, he built a great big boot to mark the entrance of his driveway — a 17-foot bit of concrete footwear that bore the image of a Brahmin bull. At the time, the boot stood at what is now the intersection of Tampa Road and McMullen Booth.

The Boyd ranch was a large spread that covered a significant bit of acreage in North Pinellas County. But, like all the other large tracts in the area, it was eventually sold to make way for housing developments, apartments and a big shopping center, appropriately named the Shoppes at Boot Ranch. When the shopping center was built, the big boot was painted white, pink and light green (not exactly cowboy colors) and was moved to a place of honor in the shopping center parking lot. That is where it still stands today.

Here’s the interesting part:

If you look closely at the base near the boot’s toe, you can see the faint outline of a small window. And if you walk around to the back, you can see the faint outline of a painted-over door.
Legend has it that Al Boyd had a small room built into the boot.

According to legend, Al was unhappy that some locals used to drive by and take pot shots at the boot. He asked the sheriff about what he could do to retaliate, and the law officer said he could return the fire if he were in or near the boot — that returning fire would be tantamount to self-defense.

So, Al reportedly would hang out in his little room in the boot and wait for gun-toting ne’er-do-wells to drive by. If they opened fire on his boot, Al supposedly would stick his rifle through the window of the boot and return fire. One night he supposedly peppered the door of a passing pickup truck when the occupants took a few shots at the boot.

The boot had a colorful past, just like Al Boyd. It seems kind of sad that it is living out its final days in a shopping center parking lot.

Tags: history, North Pinellas County, real estate

Palm Harbor won’t incorporate

We’ve written here about the effort by some in Palm Harbor to incorporate their town.  But now it looks like that won’t happen, at least this year.

Some people are surprised to learn that Palm Harbor remains an unincorporated township.  There are now around 60,000 residents in Palm Harbor, big enough for most towns to have been incorporated long ago.  But Palm Harbor has been growing like crazy for the past 20 years or so — before that it was mostly a series of orange groves.

A group called the Palm Harbor Coalition has been pushing incorporation, something that has to be approved by the state Legislature.  Two bills were working their way through the Legislature this year, but leaders of the Palm Harbor Coalition said there were some problems with wording in the bills, so they decieded to pulll them from consideration this year with hopes of ironing out the problems and re-introducing bills in Tallahasssee next year.

The Palm Harbor Coalition says that Palm Harbor can be incorporated without any increase in taxes.  Opponents say they don’t agree with that asssessment.

Tags: government, Palm Harbor

Clearwater’s Pier 60: The place for sunsets

I spent a very enjoyable day yesterday with a client from out of town, someone who has really fallen in love with Dunedin. I think we’ve found her and her family the perfect townhouse. In fact, they spent so much time on the Internet that they had a pretty good idea what property they wanted before they ever came to Pinellas County and got down to some serious looking.

Anyway, once we got done with our real estate business, she went off on her own to do some more exploring of the area. She ended up forgoing dinner, opting instead for some ice cream and a visit to Clearwater Beach to watch the sunset. This picture is one she took of Pier 60, the pier at Clearwater Beach where locals and tourists gather to watch the sunset. It’s a tradition that has been going on for the past 10 or 12 years, and it’s loosely based on the nightly sunset salute that’s been taking place at Key West for years.

As you can see by the picture, the sunsets are spectacular. But you will also enjoy the local musicians, the buskers (street performers) as well as the food vendors that set up every night. There’s plenty to do and see around here, and the Pier 60 sunsets are up at the top of the list.

Tags: Clearwater, Pier 60, sunset, things to do