Monday, January 20th – Thankful for a warm day.

Today’s temperature of 74° felt really, really good after waking up to a light frost in Orlando yesterday morning.

By afternoon the clear blue sky had some puffy white clouds appear in it. When Cordell and I noticed the change, we commented that at least there was no snow behind these clouds. We had heard weather reports from home and understood that folks back in Maryland and Virginia were expecting snow by morning. Our thoughts are with them and we pray that everyone will be safe and keep warm.

We received a Christmas gift today from our son’s mother-in-law, Paulette. She told us on Christmas Day that she was giving us only a part of her gift and that the rest would be delivered to us in Florida. We were delighted to get a basket with wine, cheese, crackers, cookies etc.

 We wanted to be outside as much as possible today, so after we completed a couple of errands, we looked for a geocache that was placed in Trailhead Neighborhood Park by one of our favorite Florida geocachers. 

 

We had to hike to 5 different stages to get the coordinates that then took us to each successive stage and the final where the log sheet was located.

 

The cache had a dinosaur theme and each stage was a different small dinosaur attached to a tree. They were very well camouflaged and the hints directed us to 3 different types of trees. 

We learned to identify the Malaleuca tree—also referred to as a paperback because its bark is shed in flat, flexible sheets. We had a botany lesson because I had to look it up on the internet to view a picture of it.

Our good geobuddy back home, Melli, had planned to go geocaching today but unfortunately she was too sick to leave home. We made videos at each stage of this multi-cache and sent them to her so she could cyber geocache along with us. By the time we found stage 5, she e-mailed us what she had figured the final cache container would be---and she was exactly right.

 

 After we got back from our outing, Cordell enjoyed spending time on the lanai.

 

It doesn’t seem possible, but the sunsets keep getting more glamorous—tonight’s was the prettiest yet.