A Visit to Southwestern Florida

Last spring my brother, Bishop Marcus Lohrmann, became Interim Bishop for the Florida Bahamas Synod.  We promised him that while he was in this area we would take him to our favorite spot in the state, Corkscrew Swamp.  Marcus had a busy work schedule last week with the synod assembly and thought that after that, and the election of the new bishop was accomplished, he would take some time off and go on a road trip with us.  We knew that Hurricane Irma had hit southern Florida hard- even had learned that Corkscrew Swamp had only part of its boardwalk open, but still decided to visit that area anyway.

After driving a couple of hours Sunday afternoon we were ready to stop for the night, and most fortunately chose Bonita Springs.  We happened upon a wonderful beach there where, after securing  a spot for the night ( we soon learned that most hotels were full and should have had reservations because disaster crews are still present taking care of damages from the storm) we chose to walk.   The beach was quite busy with many people in the water, in the picture above two fishing poles are hanging out at the water's edge. Not sure how successful is that mode of fishing!  The beach was quite littered with a few varieties of shells,  but we were interested only in a good walk.

A lot of the beach houses showed some damage from the storm.  The one pictured above looked like it had some kind of reconstruction work going on the inside.  Most of the homes and condominiums along the beach are not quite as ostentatious as that one!  For supper we ate at a restaurant which gave us seating at the water's edge.  One small alligator in the bay eyed us sleepily as we ate our meal.

Would you believe that we started our day at a church Monday?  Remember, we had the Bishop traveling with us and he felt a need to check out the local Lutheran church (ELCA).  Christus Victor is the name of the church, and Pastor Tom Slater was in the office.  We had a good visit with him and toured the park next to the church, which the church owns.  In the park there is a small lake with plaques noting the stations of the cross around it.  The park also has an outdoor worship area which still has a lot of brush laying around from the storm.  Our adventures of the day continues in the next posting on this blog site.