The big news this week was certainly our visit at West Palm Beach. After an uneventful trip down, we started our first day, Saturday, with a bang. We visited the Green Market, which is right next to the boating dock. Theirs is not an every-day boating dock, as you can see from some of the yachts in the picture below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday we had originally planned to go on a water taxi tour. Unfortunately, they were forecasting showers. While the showers never developed, I personally chickened out on getting into the harbor in a small boat when there was the possibility of a squall. It turned out to be a quiet day. I spent some time installing printer drivers for Mom’s laptop computer, then giving Mom pointers on downloading pictures from the Internet and printing them out. For most of us, using the computer is not associated with exercise. But in WPB, Internet access that requires something more than dial-up starts with a trip to the clubhouse, ensuring at least some physical activity is associated with computer use.

Monday was our busiest day. We went to McCarthy’s Wildlife Sanctuary. This is a place that accepts exotic animals that need a home. McCarthy’s is out in the sticks. All the roads in the area are unpaved gravel, but they are in good shape for gravel roads. People do all kinds of crazy things such as try to hand-raise a tiger, or have a monkey for a pet (besides all the other disadvantages you might have heard of, they like to mark their territory), or bring home a baby turtle that will grow to be 300 pounds. The only way to see the Wildlife Sanctuary is to take a tour with a guide. Guests are permitted to handle some of the animals. We didn’t handle any of the 500-pound tigers, but we did stand withing a foot of them, with only a chain link fence between us. The guide got some of the tigers to jump up on the fence and gave them belly rubs through the fence. For an additional fee, guests can participate in a tiger petting session. After almost 2 hours at the sanctuary, we went to a tea house for lunch. In the evening, we had a rip-roaring game of Parcheesi.

Tuesday it was time to go home. Danita had an important work meeting and I had a doctor’s appointment. Unfortunately, our plane had an electrical problem. This being the busy winter travel season for FL, alternate flights were booked up and spare airplanes were not available. At Noon Tuesday, instead of being at home, we found ourselves in the Fort Lauderdale airport. US Air gave us the $150 taxi ride between airports. After we arrived in Fort Lauderdale, they sprang for another $150 got us a nice hotel (Homstead Suites). We found a bakery a block from the hotel that turned out to be very ethnic (some kind of a middle-eastern place — all the customers spoke some flavor of Arabic, and the women all wore traditional Arabic head coverings). The food was quite good. I can’t remember the last time the two of us were able to have lunch for just $9 (including 2 Cokes). The hotel had a free dinner which was adequate and better than I expected. We finally made it home (via Philadelphia) early Wednesday afternoon.

Our club house got new hardwood floors in the office and craft room. This was needed for the office especially. Seven years of heavy use had made the carpet quite dirty. The new floor is quite an improvement. Unfortunately, when they moved everything back in, they found that they didn’t have Internet access. Carol, the events coordinator, called me for help. That would have been fine, but at the moment I was standing in the WPB airport trying to figure out how we would get home. When I got over to the club house Wednesday I found Steve (another resident) trying to put things back together. Nobody knows how the network in the clubhouse works, but working together Steve and I got it working in about an hour. Now that it’s easier to scoot desks away from the wall, I spent some time documenting how everything is connected for our future reference. I found that we actually have two internet services. We might be able to save the association a couple of bucks by consolidating.

Getting home late turns out to have meant that I missed some pretty good biking weather — 50 and sunny. It turned out to be rainy today, but I got a nice ride in Thursday, and the weather looks good for this weekend.

Last week I said I might have the opportunity through Re-Serve to help ACS with their web site. They decided they were taking the wrong approach and I lost the opportunity. That was a bit of a bummer, but I have to agree they had better options available. However, Re-Serve got another opportunity with an organization named CASA. Just by coincidence, they’re withing a block of ACS. We’ll see how this turns out.

I’ll end this post with some more pictures taken at McCarthy’s Wildlife Sanctuary.