Merry Christmas from Pine Island

I hope everyone at home had a wonderful Christmas.  This is our third Christmas in Florida, so we're starting to get used to the "weirdness" of being in 80 degree weather and away from family - but I don't think I'll truly EVER get used to not being home for the holiday.  This year is a little different in that Brenda and her family are actually down here in Florida, so wouldn't have been part of my Christmas anyway.  And I got some nice messages from Alan and his family wishing me a Merry Christmas and thanking me for sending a couple gifts to them all.  I talked to my mom on Christmas Eve and she is with my sister Dolores and her family for a few days, so I'm sure she had a nice holiday also.  We actually had a nice Christmas today because we went to the Christmas dinner here at the KOA.  What a feast!  The resort provided the ham, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, along with beverages.  Then everyone brought their wonderful homemade dish to pass, which of coure always means wonderful food.  I ate way too much, but Dave really outdid himself and is teetering on the brink of being totally and completely miserable.  It's 7:21 as I type this and he just went in to lay down for the rest of the evening!  You just can't put Dave into a "buffet" situation and expect him to use any kind of self-restraint (as anyone who knows him will attest to).  The people down here are really very nice - the more we get to know them, the better we like them (...not unexpected, right?).  But in spite of everything, Christmas is always at its best when you're with family....

As I mentioned above, Brenda and her family are down here right now - they are in Jacksonville visiting Arnie's daughter and her family.  I spoke to Brenda this morning and they did their Christmas yesterday and she wasn't positive what they were going to do today.  But I pulled a bunch of pictures off Tessa and Chelsey's facebooks and obviously they had a wonderful day today.  I'm going to post a few of her pictures into this blog post - don't they look like they're having fun?  And I love the pictures of Arnie with Emma - precious, aren't they?  Emma's first exposure to the ocean, commemorated for all time.  What I'm REALLY excited about, though, is that on Thursday they are going down to St. Augustine for the rest of the week so I'm going to drive up there and spend Thursday, Friday and Saturday with them.  I CAN'T WAIT!  It's only about a 4-1/2 hour drive so I plan to be there by noon at the latest on Thursday.  This will definitely be my special Christmas treat!  I'll have a mega-post for when I get back, with tons of pictures I'm sure.

When I looked back at the blog, I see that it's been ten days since I've done an update - the last one was December 15.  That's kind of a long time, but it seems like the time has just kind of slipped away.  It's weird to think that, by the time I get back from St. Augustine, we'll only have two more days before we leave Pine Island and move up to Punta Gorda.  Crazy!  We've really enjoyed the past week and a half.  So what did we do?  Hmmmm.... I have to think.....



Well, for one thing, we went with Scott and Deb to Mary and Paul's condo in Cape Coral.  They were having a few friends over for the Christmas boat parade.  We had two boats that went down through the channels and down to where the parade was getting organized.  We rode around through the different boats, checking out the very elaborate decorations on some of the boats.  Wow - some people put a few bucks into this event!!!  I'm attaching a couple pictures, but it was hard to take good shots because we were moving, they were moving and it was dark.  So this is the best I could do.  After we rode around on the boats for a while, we all went back to some other friends of Mary and Paul's and had a very nice campfire on their dockside patio.  It was a really nice evening with some old and new friends.

We also put our kayaks into the water a couple times, including once at the little city park in Matlacha.  That was fun because we paddled through some of the channels, looking at some of the "funky" little residences in this wonderful little fishing community.  We really like Matlacha - it's the connection between the mainland, which is technically Cape Coral, on the north side of Fort Myers, and Pine Island itself.  You have to go over the bridge at Matlacha in order to get onto the Island. Matlacha is this great little fishing village, with lots of little brightly-colored shops and restaurants and some wonderful restaurants and, one of our favorites, Bert's Bar.  Bert's is an old OLD bar that sits right on the edge of the water and has lots of atmosphere.  They have really good seafood, frequent live music and what they advertise as a "million dollar view".  We went there for our Christmas Eve dinner and enjoyed just sitting out on the dock overlooking the water, the fishing boats and the birds.


We even had a special little outing for Brandi - if you go through Fort Meyers and down to Bonita Beach and then head north, you come to Lover's Key.  There is a very nice little state park at Lover's Key, which we visited last year.  It doesn't have a campground, unfortunately, or it would definitely be a place we would camp at.  But just a little ways from the state park is a special little beach that is dog-friendly.  It is one of the very few dog-friendly beaches that we're ever come across, so it's a really special place for us to visit.  We took Brandi and, OH MY GOSH!, she had a BLAST.  She ran and ran and ran and ran.... well, you get the idea.  She is such a good little girl, she went up and "met" all the other dogs (which of course involves LOTS of sniffing of body parts!) but she always plays nice and is never agressive even to the little dogs.  And BOY where there a lot of dogs there - over the couple hours we were there I would guess there were 50 dogs that came and went.  The only problem with the beach, as with many places on the ocean, is that the whole place disappears when the tide comes up!  Yep, according to some of the people that we chatted with, the whole beach is virtually underwater at high tide.  In fact, I was standing there talking to one nice "mom" of Raza, a very nice mellow old German Shepherd, when she nicely pointed out to me that my bag, my chair, and my towel were now sitting IN the water!  Yikes-I don't know if we'll ever get used to this "tide" thing!

I know I'm missing a couple little things, but that's probably a pretty good summary of the past ten days.  We do a lot of walking, some biking (Dave pretty much every day, me not so much although we did ride to the Publix together the other day), and I'm still plugging away at my running program.  We've been to the pool a number of times, gone out to eat a few times, and somewhere in there I continue to work a couple of hours a day (on average) for Kerkstra.  All in all, a REALLY good life, right?

So tomorrow I pack up my little suitcase and get ready for my little road-trip up to St. Augustine.  I can't WAIT!  In the meanwhile, I send out best Christmas wishes to everyone back home - I hope you all had a wonderful day today!