Sanctuary

My brother Brad has the cutest video of his three year old daughter Tarah holding her baby sister Callie for the first time. Tarah looks up and says, " Can you take her? I'm sweatin' " Well, we have been doing our share of sweatin' between the bike riding and the warm temperatures (mid eighties with high humidity) so it finally came to pass that some laundry needed to be done. All the public buildings in this campground are truly vintage and remind me of my days at 4-H camp a (ahem) few years ago. The laundry room has a shortage of washers but plenty of dryers, which many people seem to pass up for the community clothes lines in the back yard of the laundry. Since there is nothing finer than the smell of fresh air in one's bedding, I opted to use those lines for my sheets.

Meanwhile, next door to the laundry it was time for the bird show. Libby is a remarkable woman who runs a bird sanctuary for tropical birds who cannot be kept anymore by their owners. She has ten birds right now (her husband says 11 if you count her) and they love her as she loves them. People give donations plus she sells DVDs and postcards to support the birds. They are magnificently beautiful and so very intelligent. One bird, the large blue one named JoJo, only likes and can be handled by men. Libby said that he is always looking for his owner who dropped him off here eight years ago. He sees women and children as rivals for the affection of his owner so cannot be handled by them. Libby passes the birds around to people in the crowd who are willing to be their perches. All in all, it was a very informative show; each bird has a trick or two to perform for a choice morsel of food. Libby's message is that these birds are very long-lived, totally bond with their owners, and are heart-broken when they lose their homes. Because many of the large birds are very noisy and are not good "house pets", people end up getting rid of them. If they are lucky, they come to a place like this. Periwinkle Park is a happy home for Libby's charges. I see people stopping to talk to the birds all day long.

We embarked (somewhat to Jim's initial dismay) on a Segway tour of the island in the afternoon yesterday. I had called to sign up but they needed two people to run the tour so Jim was the reluctant second. Our guide was John, a man who has lived on the island since the 70's and told us some of the history of the area plus pointed out native flora and fauna. John's parents moved off Sanibel about six years ago because it had become too busy for their tastes; now they live on an island off the coast of Panama which is only accessible by boat. No photo, but we did spot a good-sized alligator in the pond next to the golf course. One tree that is quite common on the island is the strangler fig, a tree that grows up around and absorbs another tree.
We managed to keep our Segways under control and became at least a little adept at handling them. Less sweatin' but a little hard on the soles of the feet.

Rain was trying to move in all afternoon but it waited until I retrieved my bedding from the line--just. When the rain stopped we strolled across the road to the Lazy Flamingo where Jim learned how to shuck oysters for his dinner. Not bad! A little Key Lime pie and the day was complete.