Thursday, January 10, 2013

Our plan today was to take Alyson to Sanibel which is an island north of Bonita Springs. We visited this place several times last year and will never tire of going there.

We started out with a two hour open bus tour of J. N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge.  When I purchased our tickets, the saleslady laughed when I ask her if they had a seniors rate. She answered “Honey, you are in Florida.”

Our tour guide amazed us by all his knowledge and not only was the tour interesting, but all of us learned a huge amount. Cordell remembered an area where we saw an alligator last year and he was able to spot it before the bus completely passed it. The guide stopped and everyone was able to take some good photos. Cordell’s geosence must have kicked in at just the right time!

We had a late lunch and set up our beach chairs off the parking lot of a Subway. There was seating at the Subway, but it was in the sun and at 2 o’clock it was too hot---none of us were complaining though—only making an observation.

We rented bikes so we could ride on some of the 17 miles of trails they have all over the island. There is hardly any elevation so pedaling, even for Cordell and myself, was easy.

I found it a bit amusing that the towel I took along for my bike ride had a snowman on it.

We noted that there was a 5 stage multi-cache placed on Sanibel by a geocacher from Maryland and we decided look for them. We made a couple of wrong turns during our hunt and Alyson said it felt to her like we rode 16 miles of those trails. The final cache had a geo-coin in it with the Maryland State flag on it.

There is a famous ice cream store here and we felt that Alyson needed to have that experience too. However, it was 5 o’clock by then and we knew it would spoil our dinner if we had a snack then. After a bit of discussion, we decided that we would eat ice cream for dinner. Alyson will not be 20 years old until February and she felt she can still make stupid teenage decisions for a while longer. That sounded like a good enough reason for us so we had our “dinner” at Pinocchio’s.

We returned to our condo after dark and I especially was tired. Sleep came easily for all of us and we finally woke up enough to go to bed.