When I moved from Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania to Venice, Florida one of the first things I was told was, “At night there are two things in the inland waters of lakes and rivers.” One is alligators, the other one is alligator food. So….if you are in the water at night and you are not an alligator, three guesses to what you are and the first two don’t count.

Because YOU ARE ALLIGATOR FOOD!

My home on DaVinci Drive was on a lake. We had one very large alligator and two smaller ones that were probably eight or nine feet long. They would come up and lay on the bank of our yard to be in the warm sun.

When someone called the game warden to take out the large one my granddaughter Terri and I were watching from my back yard. Several residents on the other side of the lake were standing close by watching as the game warden first caught him on a hook, pulled him onto the bank, wrestled with him, putting hand cuffs on his feet and a noose around his snout.

My granddaughter had run around the lake and was there with the crowd surrounding the game warden and the alligator. How he worked so efficiently with that huge gator was amazing. And with ten or twelve people crowding around him it was a sight to remember.

One Sunday afternoon as I was holding an “open house” at my villa listing I looked out in the park like area and saw a little old lady walking behind an alligator waving her hands at it and saying “Shooo!! Shooo!!! And you know what? That alligator was shooing! Really! I watched!

When visiting a friend in south Venice, she and I were sitting on her screened lanai. As we are talking all of a sudden I see a big smile come on her face as she looks out at the lake bordering her back yard. There are four or five alligators crawling out of the lake coming into her yard. She jumped up, ran to the bedroom, came back with a BB gun and fired shots at these alligators. They wasted no time turning tail and back in the lake they ran to underwater cover.

With my DaVinci Drive home I had a pool and a two car garage. It didn’t happen very often but alligators had at times been found in people’s pools and under their cars in the garage. I never got in the pool without first making sure there was no alligator in there. And I tread easy in my garage while first looking under my car.

I am not advising anyone to “Shooo” an alligator and you can bet your last dollar I would never have done what that lady did in the parkway behind my villa open house.

NO WAY! NO HOW!

FRF ♥