Venice Beach, Florida…

Venice Beach in Venice Florida is a place we are now closer to than ever before so we decided we needed a beach day and headed north the 65 or so miles to Venice. We stayed off of highway 75 so we could look over some of the sights in Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda since we hadn’t seen them either…

Taking Tamiami Trail or highway 41 through the southwestern Florida towns didn’t expose any places we needed to revisit but we did drive through a couple of towns that peaked our interest in North Port and South Venice. If they weren’t as far north of as as they were we would likely revisit them.

Venice, Florida itself is a quaint town that obviously knows the power of the tourists dollar as it is a very clean and well appointed town. The public beach, Venice Beach, has ample parking and is FREE unlike much of Florida’s beach parking…

Venice Beach received a Army COE sand re-nourishment that added between 130 - 160 feet of sand seaward making for a very wide beach. The beach has a different type of sand in both color and texture than most of the beaches we have come across in Florida. There is a lot of darker flecks in the sand making the sand much darker in color than most other beaches. This is likely due to the substrate that housed the treasure that many tourist come to search for in Venice… fossilized sharks teeth!

But on the public beach in Venice there are few if any shark teeth searchers and with the wideness of the beach there is ample space to lay out a towel or beach mat and just enjoy the soft surf and the blue offshore waters… We lounged in this area for some time and I even caught a few sand fleas to try my hand at some fishing… alas, with no luck…

As we left Venice Beach we checked out a few other beaches on the way back to Seminole Campground. It seemed as the further south we went the more crowded the beach became and the nicest looking one, and the most crowded, was Casperson Beach.

This is the longest beach in Sarasota County and is near the Airport on Harbor Drive. There are rocky outcroppings in this unspoiled beach left in its natural state. This is an known as the best area to look for and find pre-historic sharks teeth as could have been proven by the hoards of people scouring the sands for fossils.

Oddly there was one other person fishing while the throngs of tourists were fossiling. What made this sighting even odder was that it was a younger lady wearing a thong!!! We don’t have fishermen like that back in Texas…