The team spent all of Christmas Eve 2019 at Big Pine UMC. We decided early on in the project that we would spend some time working at the church to thank them for being such welcoming hosts. The church was flooded during Hurricane Irma but is mostly rebuild. There are still a few things that need to be completed. The sound booth needs flooring and a door to cover the HVAC unit. And there is always painting to be done.
Sound booth before
Larry and Steve used two doors in making a custom sized door for the sound booth to cover the HVAC system
Steve and Larry assembling the door
Kathy and Anne spent the day putting the flooring down in the sound booth.
Sound booth with some of the new flooring installed
Elaine and Glenita doing some touch up painting
Then tonight was the traditional Christmas Eve service with carols and the reading of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke.
Of course the program included a candle lighting service.
Last night was along night for the team. During our team meeting we learned that our county was placed under a tornado watch. We told the team what to do if we went under a warning and after our work was done we all headed back to our rigs. Max was in storm mode as there was a water spout headed straight toward Key West. Anne went to sleep – for about 15 minutes when we were suddenly placed under a tornado warning. All our team received their phone alerts and all gathered back inside the church as we had requested. Max didn’t think the worst of the storm was going to pass our way and thankfully it did not. When we experience severe weather when we are traveling, we learn how blessed we are with the TV and NWS coverage we have in our area. Since Key West is 150 miles from Miami, the stations there – the closest TV stations – don’t really cover the lower keys. The tornado warning wasn’t canceled until 11:00 but most of the team was so wide awake by then that there was little sleep to be had. Key West received 5.5 inches of rain from the storm and the streets were flooded. We had a lot of rain but no wind damage. This afternoon some of the side streets in Big Pine Key were still under water.
Rainbow on the way to Sugarloaf Key
Today Max took Glenita and Steve to Sugarloaf Key to continue work on Bob’s house. Today they hung 2 sets of closet doors, repaired a hole in the ceiling drywall, touched up some paint. The rest of the team – Larry, Kathy, Elaine and Anne returned to Dennis’ house. Larry installed the four new kitchen ceiling lights while the rest of us did the final sanding/prep on the walls in the kitchen and living room. He also did some work on the hall and bedroom drywall. After lunch the ladies, with the help of Dennis, began the priming of the walls. By the end of the day one short section of wall was all that was unprimed. We were very pleased with the appearance of the walls with the primer in place.
Closet doors installed at Bob’s
Dennis and Larry installing kitchen lights
Today was Elaine’s birthday and the 10 year old daughter of our homeowner Bob was scheduled to sing at Boondocks, a local restaurant, so the team decided to head to Boondocks after work. Unfortunately the young lady was ill and unable to appear but we all still had fun celebrating Elaine’s day. Since we are all so tired, we made an early night of it and headed home with everyone planning an early bedtime. Hope everyone is ready for Christmas.
We enjoyed another Advent service at Big Pine UMC this morning. The sermon was about Joseph and how little is written about him, but what an important part he played in the life of Jesus. Interestingly, one of our team devotions this week was about the same thing. After the service we had some fellowship time with our new team members, Steve and Glenita. It was great to learn more about them. The rest of the day was spent walking and getting ready for tonight’s team meeting.
We walked past the Monroe County Fire Department Big Pine Key station which is just a block or so from the church. We found this beautiful mural painted on the side of the station. Look closely and you can see the flag is made up of firefighters in SCBA’s. Beautiful.
Our newest members of the team, Glenita and Steve arrived about 6:30 tonight. Thankful for their safe arrival and safety parking after dark. So now all our team is in place again. We can relax a little.
The rest of the day today we did some serious walking (wind only 26 mph sustained wind today but it still shakes FRED at times). We have discovered we really like the ability to walk anywhere we need to go on Big Pine. We walk across the street the grocery store, across the highway to the flea market, down the highway a ways to one of many restaurant choices. One of the places we walked today was to a new seafood and produce stand that was having it’s grand opening today. We met the two owners earlier this week and promised them we would visit today. We bought some key lime pie, fresh salsa, grapefruit and oranges. We tried some fresh watermelon juice, fresh guacamole, and fresh shrimp ceviche which were all excellent and will be on our list for next visit. As a lot of you know, we frequently prepare snow crab legs for our Christmas dinner along with some other not so traditional but favorite items. This little market has stone crab claws. Since we are in the Keys, we decided to go local and they will be steaming us some fresh stone crab claws for our 2019 Christmas dinner. We came home and looked up stone crab since we have never eaten it and found that when they catch the crab, they harvest one of the claws, release the crab and when the crab molts it grows another claw. Who knew? Certainly not us. We had another great day in the Keys. Hope everyone has finished their shopping and is ready to concentrate on the real reason for Christmas. Stay safe.
Generations Seafood also has a produce section.
The owner told us many of the items in the gift shop were made by locals.
RVing With a Purpose 