2007 Florida

We picked up Mom and then Dave and Carol and headed off to Orlando, via Atlanta. Based on his flight experience, Dave has a new horror movie title: Babies on a Plane. Betsy and Ed had dinner for us that night. I had had a cold to begin with, but it had gotten worse during the week, and then much worse still on the plane. Betsy tried to fix me up by giving me a tablespoon of coconut oil. It was sort of like lard, and I figured it would either cure or kill me.

Unfortunately, it did neither. I had what wound up being a chest cold, and/or bronchitis for the rest of the week. Maybe I needed a few more dollops of that stuff.

The four of us stayed at the Lake Roy Beach Inn. Contrary to what we read about it, it seemed dated and not entirely clean. We saw some geckos on the outside of the window of Dave and Carol’s room. Then Carol discovered that they’d been inside at some point as well – they had left their calling cards around the windowsill. All this tended to upset her a bit.

Bright and early the next day we all went to the flea market on route 27 near Winter Haven. Could’ve spent all day there. It’s Americana at its best. We also stopped at the Cleveland Indians Spring Training facility even though they’re not there just yet.

Before heading down to Fort Myers, we stopped at the Florida Aviation Museum. Saw some old planes, and at least one newer warbird. I got a picture of what looks like Mom in the cockpit of one of them. The four of us took off from there, and Betsy, Ed and Mom went back to their place.

Our place in Fort Myers, a 2-bedroom condo at the Pink Shell, was beautiful. It appeared to be newly renovated. Too bad Fort Myers Beach itself had a major issue: seaweed. Although the sand was pure white, there was a large area of seaweed along the shore. At some places it was a foot or more high. And it stunk. We eventually learned that it was due to the channeling of pollutants in Lake Okeechobee out through a river that ended up there in Fort Myers. The river apparently causes the seaweed to wash up there. This is only a recent phenomenon, and no one seems to know what to do about it. The guy scraping the beach said he wasn’t allowed to move it out of the way. Between that gunk and my chest cold, I didn’t go in the ocean the whole time.

We went to a nature preserve on Sanibel Island. It was a self-drive 4-mile tour; we made many stops and saw a whole mess of birds and a small gater. It was pretty neat stuff. After the preserve we continued driving on up to Captiva Island where we’d heard had no seaweed. They lied, but it wasn’t quite as bad.

We also drove down to Naples to visit Aunt Sue and Uncle Jim. Had a nice time – they have a nice condo there. After dinner we walked the Naples pier and then had ice cream.

For our last act we drove to the Everglades for an airboat ride. We went both fast and slow through mangrove forests, and saw a gater in the water coming towards us – especially when the driver placed his hand in the water. We also had some pelicans land on our boat looking for handouts. It was loads of fun. Saw a BIG Honkin Gater later on.

And that was pretty much it. Too bad we didn’t have more time.