This morning we worshipped at Zion Lutheran Church here in
Fort Myers. We attended the 10:45 am. “blended service” which consists of
liturgy and songs. Before the service ended, the Pastor requested that all the
snowbirds who were leaving this week to stand and then he said a nice prayer
for them. I also noted that the Service Program had an item that asked the
snowbirds to change their contact information to their “northern address”. They have an associate minister and his wife
who are snowbirds and they will be flying back home next week.
Earlier this morning, our son Andy sent us a text with this
photo and commented that this was what we almost came home to. For sure, this
would have been the day we would have arrived back home had we not been able to
extend our time here in Florida.
It was such a beautiful day here that we could not resist
doing something outside. And so we took off to look for a few geocaches. I
wanted to do a bit of hiking so we started at the Caloosahatchee River Preserve
West. This is our 5th winter here in Southwest Florida and we still
are finding different preserves to visit.
A sign was posted at the beginning of the trail advising
that the trial might be under water and to be prepared to get our feet wet.
We hiked through some very pretty vegetation and we did not
encounter any water or mud. I wondered how this area must have looked to the
first people who originally explored it and later to the ones who developed it.
I cannot imagine how much planning and work went into draining the swamps to
make it what it is today.
One of our geocache searches took us to a property where
goats are raised. We met the 15 year old cache owner’s father who was moving 3
of his goats from one field to another. We had a very interesting conversation
with him about the business of raising and selling goats. Currently he has 40
goats, many of which will be having babies soon.
Early in our conversation, when he found out that we were
from Maryland, he told us that he had graduated from Johns Hopkins University.
Jokingly, I replied that I didn’t know that they had a study for goat farming. He had a good laugh and then told us that he
is an eye surgeon here in Fort Myers and that goat farmers cannot afford to
drive a Porsche.
Another geocache took us to a boat launching site. We saw
some very pretty homes along a canal which looked like a very nice place to live.
We ended our adventure at a Florida Forest Service site.
There was a field puzzle here that required us
to find information on the sign to get the coordinates for the final placement of
the cache. It was a very easy puzzle to solve and the cache was on the ground
beside this Smokey the Bear sign.
We took full advantage of this 3rd bonus day and
were more than ready to relax when evening arrived.
No comments:
Post a Comment