St. Andrews Lutheran Church

This is the church we attend on Sunday mornings in Homestead, Florida. The people are friendly and we enjoy the service.

Brayden's First Birthday

Brayden is the "Birthday Boy!"

The presents

The presents are on top of the box, but Brayden seemed to like the inside of the box better.

He figured out how to open the presents and off came the paper.


A taste of the book and, yup, it's a good book!

Birthday cake

Brayden blew out the candle and it was official--one year old!

Everglades National Park

Pat and Donald and we decided to "do the Everglades." We took the 38 mile drive to Flamingo (kind of the end of the road) and then slowly headed back.

The first stop was Eco Pond. We found birds and gator tracks. It's somewhat disconcerting to see the tracks come out of the pond and not know where the alligator went from there.

I still find the palm trees fascinating. This one was especially beautiful against the blue, blue sky.

We brought a little lunch and ate "out."

Alligators

We worked our way back up the road and stopped off at any spot that looked interesting. This first guy was just laying there inviting us to come closer to take a close up.


There were more alligators out than we had ever seen before. The Anhinga Trail is a boardwalk through the swamps and, besides the birds, it was filled with alligators.

Shark Valley--north Everglades

Pat and Donald decided they hadn't had enough of the Everglades so we headed for one of the northern entrances to the park and found more fascinating wildlife--more birds and more alligators. But on the walk we were up close and personal!



Pat and Donald are "birders" so we learned a lot about birds. We checked them out through the binoculars and double checked them in the bird book. There always seemed to be other people around who knew stuff too.




The last picture is an anhinga drying his wings in the sun after a swim in the water.




Click on any picture for a close up look at these beautiful birds.