How did I get so far behind?

I thought I had at least finished Florida. It has been a month now so I will get right on that. . .

Day five (Sunday)

Of course, we went to church. It was just so hard to find. We drove around for over an hour chasing down addresses from Dex on line . . who knew there would be and "old" road and a "new" road? Finally I spotted a spire that just looked like one of ours and it was! The next sacrament meeting was a Young Adult-Singles Ward. It was Fast and Testimony as they had Ward Conference the week before. I can't tell you how much it took me back-such a wide variety of people. I did bare my testimony and told the audience about my experiences with Black-Americans 36 years ago. i am truly grateful that now we do not have to worry about one's heritage. it is what we do that counts. "Every worthy male" was a great blessing in my life!
After Church we headed home to the hotel. Pat went to McDonalds and got us salads for dinner and we just enjoyed the afternoon nap and time together.

Day six (Monday)
We had to get up early to get to the boat for our trip to Grand Bahama Island. It was a rainy day but the ocean was not all that rough. The Boat was big enough to handle it anyway. We got a nice room and enjoyed the breakfast buffet. We met some nice young people from the island who'd been to Washington DC to perform with their band at the Cherry Blossom Festival. There were mnay such young people on the way over.
We signed up and paid for the tour of a beautiful garden on the island. Rain was not going to get in our way. But it really rained and rained and rained. We were soaked in spite fo our plastic ponchos. I was really glad we had not chosen the beach trip! The garden was really beautiful and for a bonus there were some exotic birds flying around.
The tour bus driver made an interesting comment. He thanked us-as Americans-for all we had done to help his island recover from a devastating hurricane. Evidence of the hurricane remained everywhere. But it was nice that Americans were not seen as "ugly" or "selfish" here.

We enjoyed the buffet dinner and went back to the room. It was an older boat with very, very thin walls. There was a singles party next door and a disco directly up stairs, it made for some laughable listening. Oh how blessed we are to be who we are!
Evidently Customs had a few problems with our arrival and we ended up waiting a long time to get off the boat-but when the time came we were off and out of there. We were also grateful to see so many taxi cabs lined up to transport the over indulging drinking crowd!
One last night in our beach front hotel and it is off to Key West tomorrow.

Day seven (Tuesday)

We left relatively early but wanted to avoid the rush hour traffic. We traveled the extension of the turnpike down to ------where we got off and visited for just a few minutes with one of Mary's school friends, Jill Child, who now lives there. He little boy was asleep but it was fun to see her.
The trip on down to Key wast was just a warm lovely ride, punctuated by road construction, potty and ice stops. Just part of life when traveling with Water pills!

We didn't arrive at the hotel until after four and unfortunately were too late for me to go parasailing. I really was all geared up for it.. We tried to get on the last trip of the little train-but missed that too. I was appauled at the price of parking-$10 for even just an hour! So we didn't even get to shop. We did manage to get possibly the last free spot on the island to have the southern most point picture taken.
I really wanted a good seafood dinner. We went right across the street to the Marriott. It was so good! Pat had fresh tuna and I had yellow tail with a cucumber salsa--so very good! A little expensive but soooooo good!!!