Sun, Thunderstorms, Tornado, Sun

January 12, 2016

We have had some interesting weather for the past few days and it has not all been sunny and warm. On Saturday, rain was predicted so we decided to catch an early showing of the new Star Wars movie. I must confess that I was disappointed in the events.

Later that afternoon, the rain set in to stay throughout the night. Our condo has an almost a full wall of sliding glass doors which provided too much of a view of the storm for me. The wind blowing through the palm tree leaves sounded eerie to me.

 Early evening while we were watching the Pittsburg-Cincinnati playoff game, both of our phones gave an alert for a tornado watch and we were advised to seek cover immediately. That unsettled me a bit.

 

The local television station did a great job of providing information while they continued to show the game in a part of the screen when there was not a commercial airing.

I felt a little better when the tornado watch expired although there still was a severe thunder storm warning with the possibility of hail. However, in less than an hour another tornado watch was issued. In the meantime, thunder was crashing and lightning was flashing all around and over us. It seems that the weather moves quickly over this part of Florida and at times this storm was traveling at 50 mph.

 

Later, we heard that a tornado was confirmed as touching down at Cape Coral which is about 7-10 miles northwest of our condo. 

The rain continued through the night and into Sunday.

On our way back from church, we saw this car from Ohio sporting a Ft. Myers personalized license tag.

We settled in to watch the two playoff games and were sad but not surprised when our Redskins lost their game. However, we were glad that they at least won their conference and made an appearance in the playoffs.

 

Today, we went on a geocaching adventure with our local friend, Brian.

His house is located off McGregor Boulevard which I think is the prettiest drive in town. It is described as “the grand dame of Fort Myers roadways”. Legend has it, that after arriving in Fort Myers in 1885, Thomas Edison aided by his wife, Mina, and others who had an abiding respect for nature, began planting 200 imported palm trees along the dirt road between the downtown and his estate. An estimated 1800 palm trees along with many other varieties of trees, now line McGregor Boulevard. These magnificent Royal Palms, many surpassing 75 feet, give Fort Myers its nickname as "the City of Palms."

Brian identified this huge plant as a night blooming cereus cactus. Apparently, its flowers have a short life and bloom only once a year and only in the night. He offered to give me one of his to bring home, but since I have a “brown thumb”, I graciously declined.

Even though it was a bit cool, we still were able to eat our lunch outside. We don’t see many convenience stores at home that have picnic tables at the front door.

We did a lot of walking while looking for 9 new geocaches that had just been published the night before. Then we were able to drive and park for the next 15 caches we found.

My granddaughter’s birthday was today and I was having a video call with her when we arrived at a cache site. She likes to go geocaching with us so we took her with us on a virtual hunt. This was one of the cutest cache containers we found today. As its name “Gourd-E” implies, it is a cache hidden within a gourd.

There is a huge development, Lehigh Acres, which reminds me a lot of Bowie in Maryland. Driving there can be quite frustrating because there are canals all over the place where many streets dead end. One of the cache sites we visited was at the place where four canals meet.

We noticed some interesting things while we were out today. We saw a woman riding a bicycle and she had put her helmet on top of her straw hat. Wonder how much protection that gives her? Helmets are required here only for children under 16 years of age.

Brian told us that this dilapidated vehicle is called a “Rat Rod” that some people really enjoy creating and using.

This tree in someone’s yard was covered with birthday balloons and other decorations. Upon looking more closely at it, we discovered that it was celebrating the birth of Jesus.

We arrived back at the condo in time to make dinner and then we watched the exciting football championship game between Alabama and Clemson.