Bunche Beach

Another Saturday night on the journey but this one finds us at the same church as last Sunday.  We are still here partly because its Christmas-New Years Weekend and its nice not to be on the road too much. Yes, everything they say about snow bird driver habits seems to be true.  Yes, even the things they have said about this snow bird as well.

So this morning I walked to the Alva post office to mail a bill payment and take a short walkabout Alva.  The post office was closed.  But this is a small town, and the post master was working out back getting caught up from Christmas and she happily took my mail and posted it. I missed getting her name.  But if we received one more mail packet from daughter Jenn through this post office I imagine we’d become fast friends.

I walked a bit, and photoed a bit. Here’s an interesting front yard.  Who says Nederland, Colorado has the market sown up on ‘hippy’.

 

Here’s a place I’d like you to place prayers around.  I won’t tell you the woman’s name who lives here, to maintain her privacy. But Alva UMC is doing all it can to keep her safe in a home that probably should be immediately condemned.

At any rate, you know the church is desperate to help her when Pastor Ralph turns to me yesterday and says, “Ken, are you at all handy? We are trying to get some work done so she can at least use her bathroom.”  I told him I’d sweep, and mop, and clean up behind gifted handy persons, but me, handy???  Just ask Mona.

We leave Monday or Tuesday, at this point, so we won’t be around to even help with that.

This afternoon we drove around the Riverside at Alva and the Orange Harbor at Fort Worth Shores 55 and over doublewide home developments.  Just checking, we told ourselves. Alva has Orange Harbor beat hands down for us.  So quiet, larger lots and very well landscaped and maintained.  Also it offers a community wide riverside park and small marina, not only private sites with docks on the river. No manatee here as we are above the Caloosahatchee Waterway Frankford Lock, but good fishing and smooth boating right out into the gulf twenty miles west.

We were going to spend the afternoon and sunset at the beach on Lover’s Key on the gulf down near Bonita Springs.  However there was a nine mile long traffic crawl from Fort Myers Beach to Bonita so we turned off east toward Bunche Beach.

This is a small, natural and pretty clean stretch of thin beach and mangrove surrounded boardwalks and kayak/canoe streams that face the lower tip of Sanibel Island.

This beach was the first public beach people of color could bathe at in the Fort Myers area. Dedicated in 1949, it was named for Ralph Bunche, who was the African American who was the primary negotiator in the United Nations ceasefire that ended the first Arab-Israeli war.  It is no accident that this was the furthest public beach from Fort Myers at the time.

 

We enjoyed the warm air (85 at 3 pm) and water (about 72) and the soft wavelets splashing on the shell strewn sand.  We read, and we slept, and we picnicked, and we watched the sun go down.

Sanibel light had started rotating before dusk and winked a good night to us as we got in the car and headed back home to Alva.

Church tomorrow!  First service at 8:30.

-Ken