Well, the weather for the past three
days has been much, much warmer—almost too hot, but you will not hear me
complain.
We didn’t do very much on Sunday. We
went to church and on our way back I noticed mostly grey haired people waiting
to be seated for dinner at a Perkins restaurant. I can just bet that all of
them are snowbirds like us.
We grilled chicken on our lanai for
our dinner.
There is a house in our neighborhood
that continues to display a snowman on their lawn. I wonder if they are missing
the snow up north or perhaps they are going to keep it there until the snow
season is over.
Monday, we drove about 15 miles east
to the Lehigh community and spent a big part of the day looking for geocaches. While traveling through some areas
we noticed panther crossing signs, but have yet to see one on the road. I’m not
sure what we would do if we did see one!
One
of the large neighborhoods there reminded us a lot of the Bowie area at home.
When looking at a map application on our iPhone, it looked like squares on a
grid. We had some problems navigating to some of the cache sites because many
of the streets dead-ended at a canal and then picked up again on the other
side.
Some of the streets are sand and
this one reminded me of the times my sons played with their Tonka trucks in the
dirt piles. Instead of snow plowed up on the sides, we have sand plowed up on
the sides.
We found seven different caches
which were owned by the same person. All of them were very unique. They were cleverly
crafted and hidden. Sometimes, access to the logs was tricky and challenging. After
we found the first one, we were intrigued and knew we just had to look for the
others. And we were not disappointed.
Previous finders for this cache had
logged hints about a Harry Potter movie. Since we have never seen any of those
films, we watched a scene from one of them on YouTube. It was truly gross, but
it gave us the information we needed.
One of the sites was in the woods
off a street in a neighborhood. When we stopped our car, a huge dog began
barking at us. Even though he was standing on the front porch, he was not
chained. Cordell decided to drive around the block and access the site from the
other side. We were whispering and doing our best imitation of walking like
Indians with hopes that the dog would not hear us. We flushed two doves out of
the bushes and it startled me because I thought that dog had come off the porch
and was waiting for us at the cache!
The last cache we found was placed
by someone else and it was an experience we both want to forget. For starters,
we took the wrong way to hike into the site and it was tough going in this
Florida terrain which, even though it is flat in most places, it has lots of
vegetation growing which required us to bushwhack. When we finally reached the
cache site, Cordell stepped on a nest of ground bees. If you have ever wondered
how fast a soon to be 71 year old man can run, you should have been with us. In
the meantime, I was standing by the geocache which was laying in the open on
the ground, obviously not in the place it was intended to be. I shouted at Cordell
to not run in my direction. I quickly signed the log and did not attempt to
relocate the cache because I wanted to get out of there before those bees found
me too! They were still swarming when we left and we never looked back. I can
say we made a beeline out of there!
We stopped for lunch at Perkins Family
Restaurant which has a nice variety of food for good prices. When Cordell was
eating his broccoli, he commented that he was surprised that it had been cooked
so well done. My answer was that I think it is because so many old people
eating there have dentures and it would be more difficult for them to chew it
otherwise.
It was really foggy when we got up
this morning (Tuesday) and the weather service had issued an alert. By midmorning, the
sun was shining.
After 28 days in Florida, we finally made it to the beach today. I especially wanted to go to Delnor-Wiggins
Pass State Park in Naples. I have kept a photo of this beach on my iPhone wallpaper
for the past year because it is one of my favorite places.
When we arrived
there, we were surprised to see so much fog over the gulf that the horizon wasn’t
visible.
The sun came out soon after we arrived and we
spent 2 ½ hours there. We didn’t want to get sunburned this first time out.
The seagulls appear to be quite bold
and I could almost swear that one of them was the same one that spent a lot of
time near me last year! Perhaps I should give him a name. Some people were
eating lunch while sitting in their beach chairs and these birds swooped in
within a minute.
We had a high temperature of 84°
today and even though it had cooled off by early evening, it still was much, much
warmer than at home.
We have heard reports of ice and
snow in other parts north and east and we are again so very thankful that we
can be here at this time of the year.
