Pompano Beach and Boca Raton

It's been a while since the last post, even changed years from 2012 to 2013.  So, let's get caught up on our visit to Pompano Beach and Boca Raton.  We lived in Boca from 1987 to 1990 when I worked at West Palm Beach approach and tower, probably my favorite of the 9 facilities I worked at in a 26-year career with the FAA.  It was my last full-time controller job before moving into supervision and then managing 3 facilities before retiring in 2005.  Those were some great years.  I had been selected to work at Charlotte or West Palm (PBI), the FAA gave me my choice, and we chose PBI just to do something different. We had never even been to south Florida before Rhonda and I came down for our house-hunting trip.  We started looking at Hobe Sound and worked our way south to Boca.  We found a new development in Boca called "Main Street" and bought a house that was still under construction. Unlike our home in Ft. Myers which has since been bulldozed, this one is still standing. Here it is today at 22146 Flower Drive.  "Main Street" is now "Boca Woods."

Those were some great years.  Adam was 6-9 and Scott was 3-6.  Rhonda and I still had our first boat which was a 16-foot Neuman bowrider and I'll never forgot one of our early trips down to the Keys.  We had found a great snorkeling spot off the coast of Bahia Honda Key.  The reef was called Looue Key and was about 11 miles offshore.  We were out there in this 16 footer and a storm rolled through.  I promised myself and family if we ever made it back to shore that day we would have to get a bigger boat!  We did and we did - a new 220 SeaRay Sundancer that we bought at the Ft. Lauderdale Boat Show.  It was perfect and we had some great times in it.

We found a great church at Boca Glades Baptist and still have great friends from there to this day.  Tying the church and boat together, meet Sandy and Mickey Panella.  They had kids about the same age as ours, Lee and Cheryl, and we've actually had both families on that SeaRay (4 adults, 4 kids, and our Golden Retriever) at one time, overnighting at Boca Chita Key on the south edge of Biscayne Bay.  They visited with us 2 separate times for food and Sequence/Dominoes while we were at Pompano and also picked us up for church.

Speaking of Boca Glades, when we found the church, the members were meeting in a school on Sunday mornings and a warehouse on Wednesdays.  We were later able to build our first building which today is the building just for pre-school!

Today, add lots more buildings to the left and to the right, including a beautiful new sanctuary.

We got to to see lots of our friends and another special couple is Gil and Donna Covey.  They took us to lunch after church and also joined us on the boat on 2 occasions for catching up and some Sequence games also.  (I had to edit Rhonda and me out of this pic - we both had strange smiles/expressions on our faces for some reason).  By the way, Donna has an absolutely beautiful voice!  They have recently built a second home on Lay Lake in Alabama (near Birmingham) so we'll be visiting with them some more in the future.

We rode around Boca and checked out the schools that Adam and Scott attended and some other old friends' homes, stirring up a few more memories.  All in all, a very nice reunion time and trip down memory lane.  We also got some nice shots of a pelican that decided to perch close by on one of the pilings on the aft port corner of the boat.

And before we said our final goodbye to Boca/Pompano, I got some shots of HMR at the dock, and the beach which was only 2 blocks away (shortly after sunrise and the morning cleaning/leveling of the sand by the beach crews).