Tuesday, December 31st – The Last Day of 2013

Today we made our final drive on this long trip. Each day is getting warmer and warmer as we get farther south. It was 57° when we started out this morning.

Our first goal today, was to drive to Winter Park and find a web cam geocache. We have never had this experience before and it took a bit of thought for us to figure out all that needed to be done in order to be credited with a find. We were required to have the image of us saved from the web cam site and post it on the geocaching site. Technology has changed since this cache was created and we realized that we did not need a second party, as instructed by the cache owner, to capture our image on their PC since we had iPhones and had access to the internet. To be safe, we called our geobuddy, JoAnne, and asked her to watch for us on the web cam site and if she saw us wandering around searching for the web cam to phone us and tell us where to look! However, it was easy for us to spot the cam which was attached to the City Hall building and get the image we needed. JoAnne saw us on the web cam site and we all thought this was a neat experience!

I can’t believe that we passed through Orlando and did not stop at Disney World.

Driving along we used roads that are so straight that both of us thought that our car could almost drive itself. I saw a man cutting the grass along the side of the highway. We saw a lot of orange groves and a few semi-trucks that had their trailers loaded with loose oranges,

We stopped briefly in Lake Placid, the town that has murals on the walls of many buildings. We saw a huge one today that we had not seen when we passed through last year. This western scene was on the side of a grocery store and there was recorded sounds playing constantly. I like to make a photo that looks like I am part of the mural.

The city also finds clever ways to decorate their trash cans.

When the temperature got to 76° this afternoon, I made my first complaint about being too hot—something I vowed I would never do before I left the cold weather in Maryland! But, I was not wearing warm weather clothing and I am positive it will be more tolerable when I wear shorts and sleeveless shirts!

We made stops all along the way while driving today and found a few more geocaches—all of which have been quick, easy finds for us. The last one we stopped for was rated a 4 difficulty level—a personal challenge to Cordell. I just knew we would not be able to spend as much time as we needed to find it and that we would be disappointed to end our day and this year by logging a “did not find”. We have seen some other hides like this one and Cordell had it in his hands within 15 seconds!

After about another hour, we arrived in Ft. Myers which will be our home for the next 3 months. We have a room for tonight at the same hotel where we spent three weeks when we were here on our first snowbird trip in 2012. We are looking forward to checking into our condo tomorrow and settling in for a good long while.