February 3-6, 2013

Sunday,

I don’t think I could ever get tired of seeing the beautiful sunrises here in southwest Florida.

The sunsets are pretty as well, but most of the time I am so involved in something else, that I miss them

We worshiped at Hope Lutheran Church again today. It was our fourth Sunday there and we have brought four visitors with us during that time. I find it interesting that more people attend the traditional service than attend the contemporary service. Today, one of the musicians wore overalls and was barefooted.

 

Since this was Melli’s last day with us, we decided to search for some extraordinary geocaches. In the process of caching, we saw some really pretty places.

  

 Cordell and I wore our Baltimore Ravens apparel all afternoon and evening with hopes that it would bring the team luck. Several strangers initiated conversations with us and it seemed that most of them were hoping that the Ravens would win.

  After we got home, we settled in to watch the Super Bowl. It was an exciting game and we could only guess as to how wild the fans at home were reacting. There was no napping for us during this game!

On Monday, we spent most of our time cleaning our condo and making preparations to receive our next guests.

 

I prepared a Valentine package to send to our granddaughter. It seems that the post offices here are always jammed every time I go. I saw a lot of people mailing packages. They couldn’t all be for Valentine’s Day, could they?

While we were running errands, we of course took the opportunity to look for some more geocaches.

Tuesday, we did a little shopping

..... and a bit more geocaching. We had an very unusual experience on one of the caches. While driving to the cache site, I was having a video call with my granddaughter, Janelle, who was at home in Maryland. When we got out of our car, I took her with me and turned the camera around so she could watch where we were going. She was able to help us look around and after we found the cache, we took a photo of my iPhone with her still on the video call. 

 Wednesday was a day of great anticipation because we were waiting for the arrival of Janelle and her mother. We dashed out to the grocery store to restock our food. Then we spent a while at the swimming pool working on our suntans. A fire truck arrived in the neighborhood and I thought it might have been called because it was so hot outside!!

 

 Finally, finally the slow time passed and were drove to the airport in Fort Myers. There is some interesting art in the airport.

We were able to see the airplane pull up to the gate and Janelle had already sent a text that they were on the ground. 

We enjoyed seeing the clothing that the people from that plane were wearing---long pants, long sleeved shirts with sweaters and jackets. The outside temperature was 77° and we were standing there in our summer clothes.

Any grandparent can well imagine the joy we felt to see our granddaughter and to give her a hug. We had only been away for a few days over one month, but we missed her a lot.

We ate dinner out—and it really was out—outside on the sidewalk seating at the restaurant near our condo.

When we came back from dinner, I discovered Cordell and Janelle hiding while they were eating ice cream!

 

And so we went to bed with big plans of how we are going to spend the next 4 days.