sponge capitol of the world

We arrived in Orlando on the 16th in the evening after spending the night at our rental that night early the next morning my husband and I left for Tarpon Springs a quaint little Floridian town with a Greek flair.  The reason for this is because we were in search of a nice dive out in the gulf (after our plans to dive the keys fell through) and ended up here!  Shortly after arriving at the dive shop however they let us know the gulf dive was being cancelled due to choppy seas.  They did have a dive scheduled after they explained the dive, and saw that my husband and I were not all that enthused about it the shop owner said, "Well if you don't mind a little bit of a drive why don't you head out to Crystal River to go dive with the manatees?"  After making a few calls from the place and reserving our dive time we then headed out to explore the town a little (might as well we drove all that way, right!)  Not really knowing the town at all we just started driving and ended up somehow in what we believe to be the old part of town with shopping and restaurants galore to choose from.

  The only problem was the only type of restaurants they had there were all Greek style, so if you were not in the mood for Greek you were out-of-luck!  We first arrived and found a place to park which was not hard at all we parked behind the town’s aquarium and proceeded to walk up the street and find a place to eat.  As we were walking we noticed every shop had tons of sponges out on the street and there were murals dedicated to sponge divers as well as a statue, it turns out Tarpon Springs is the “sponge capitol of the world” funny I had never heard of it before ;).  As we were walking and checking out which restaurant was not so authentic that my husband could actually eat at it, we came across two men who were really talking up a small tour of seeing sponge diving as it was done in the old days!  $8 per person my husband and I bit the hook and fell into their little tourist trap, they took us out just a little bit down the channel then this guy donned on an old dive suit and got into the water and retrieved a sponge, then everybody uhhh and ahhhed!  That was that on the way back to the dock they passed out post cards which you could buy for a dollar and of course a tip jar was placed strategically on the boat so you could not miss it on your way off.   My husband and I could not help but notice that while Tarpon Springs had quite a bit of tourists we were the only ones below the age of 50.  After our little tour we picked the restaurant right next door the place we got the tour from.  This place was pretty good and best of all my husband was able to find something on the menu he was willing to eat!  After lunch we headed for the beach and just collected a few shells then we were on our way to Crystal River.