Saturday, March 26th

This was a very good day for me because I felt better than any time for the past three months. Too bad, we only have 7 more days to spend here in this warm climate.

 

We met up with our friend, Brian, and took off south to Naples to look for some geocaches.

 

 

It was a very warm day with temps in the high 80’s—almost too hot, but I don’t dare complain. It just affirms my opinion that I would not like to live here during the summer months.

 

Pest control appears to be a popular business here and we have seen many company vehicles everywhere we go. Today I saw this vehicle which also offers palm tree injections. I asked Brian about it and he informed me that the palm trees can become infected with Lethal Yellowing, a disease which causes infected plants to die in 3 to 6 months. The only effective cure is prevention.

 

 

Naples is a beautiful city and seems to have a lot of upscale housing. Brian told us that even the smallest, oldest houses are very expensive.

 

 

 

We began our adventures in Picayune Strand State Forest which is made up primarily of cypress swamps, wet pine flatwoods and wet prairies. There is a challenge geocache placed there that Cordell really wanted to find. We qualified for this challenge since we have found caches that were hidden by cachers whose official cache name begins with each of the 36 alphanumeric characters (A through Z and 0 through 9).

 

 

 

Since there has been an unusual amount of rainfall here lately, and since the elevation is very low, we had serious concerns that the trail to the cache might be under water. During the rainy season, some people have waded through waist deep water. Often, the water can be knee high. But, we were lucky today because even though the trail was a bit muddy and soggy in places, we were able to reach the cache and write our names on the log.

 

 

 

We visited some interesting geocaches in the urban area also. I saw this bench in one of the parks. It was placed in the memory of a loved one and roses were attached to it. I did stop and smell the roses while Cordell and Brian kept walking to the cache site.