Farmers Market and Geocaching again

On Saturday, the other resident volunteers were going to the Farmers Market in Bonita Springs, so Tom and I tagged along with them.  We didn’t need much (and couldn’t fit much, since we had just gone grocery shopping!), but we wanted to check out the local produce and fish.

We were up bright and early, and left the park just after 7:30am!  There were several produce vendors, and seafood vendors, along with various crafts and clothes.

These hats were really pretty . . . “Kim hats” – Florida-style!

There were some great-looking homegrown strawberries (you could smell them everywhere!),

but I had already picked some up at the grocery store, so I didn’t get any more.  I did pick up some sweet corn, squash, green beans, and grapefruit though . . . and Tom found some fish for himself and Nicolas for dinner!

After the Farmers Market, we went with Mark & Maryann to Dixie Wholesale Grocery.  They’ve been telling us about this place, and we just had to check it out!  It’s quite a place – with “seconds” of a variety of grocery items, and a wine selection that would rival Trader Joe’s!  We just picked up a few snacks, but we’ll probably check back in a few more times while we’re here.

Back at the park, we decided to try to find a couple more of the geocaches, and our new neighbors joined us to see what it was all about.  One geocache was on the Black Island Trail, and from the clue, we narrowed the location down to somewhere around the fishing gates in the canal.

We hopped on the bikes and headed to the trail.

We found this gopher tortoise right along the side of the bike trail – I think we interrupted his lunch!

When we got a little too close for comfort, he scurried back to his burrow!

We arrived at the fishing gates,

but Bryce noticed that the batteries in our GPS had died!  We tried looking around without the GPS, and tried using Nicolas’ phone to navigate us to the location, but weren’t successful with either!  We’re not having much luck with geocaches!!  We decided to give up and try again with recharged batteries another day.

We rode around the rest of the trail, and stopped by the alligator pond to see if we could spot the baby alligators.

Bryce spotted 3 along the edge of the pond, and I tried to get a good picture of one of them.

We could see them moving around in the water, and hear their “gulping” sounds, and took off when we thought we heard “gulping” sounds coming from behind us!

Since we couldn’t go look for the other geocache, we decided to ride down to the beach.

It was a beautiful day, and there were still quite a few people swimming and enjoying the sunny afternoon.  The water was really clear, and felt refreshing after our bike ride – even if we did just go in up to our knees!

On the way back to the Tram Circle, we saw a couple birds in the water, hunting for their dinner!

Another great day in south Florida!