I had never been to the Gulf Coast side of Florida before, but I was pleasantly surprised-- the beaches and the surroundings were very nice, and the weather was unbeatable. Water temperature was about 69-70 degrees, which is very swimmable in my book (the kids and I had a bunch of ocean swimming sessions). The sand is very fine and sort of dusky looking; the water is not super-clear but nowhere near as brown and muddy as what you get in TX and LA closer to the Mississippi.
Sanibel is shaped sort of like a crescent moon (or as Lydia and Ethan put it, "a shrimp"), about 11-12 miles long and 3 miles wide. The long axis is perpendicular to the main part of the Florida coastline; apparently this is one of the geographical features that makes it such a great place to find seashells.
Sunday we decided that we would get started by visiting the Shell Museum, which turned out to be a whole lot more interesting that I thought it would be. They had a cool half-hour video presentation that entitled "The Life of Mollusks", which was quite informative, and showed a bunch of the most common species native to the area. The two most interesting "locals" are the Florida Fighting Conch and the Lightning Whelk; these two prolific species are just about all over the place in Sanibel. The rest of the museum was mainly exhibits / dioramas of various shell types, some local and some from the rest of the world. Photo taken outside the museum:
For reasons I can't comprehend, it seems that on our recent vacation trips we've wound up being given rental cars that are all vaguely boxy or cubical. The car this time is no different (the kids noticed immediately, of course):
We spent the afternoon noodling around and getting oriented; the condo had a small but nice swimming pool and a set of tennis courts, and has very easy access to the beach. The unit itself was very comfortable-- nice big kitchen, lovely screened-in porch extending across the ocean side:
Dinner Sunday at the "Timbers" restaurant; the food was good, but it was a little on the noisy side, so we weren't able to have a great deal of conversation during the meal.
Monday we headed up to the J. "Ding" Darling Wildlife Preserve to do some kayaking. We got set up with our rentals and headed our for a paddle in Tarpon Bay, which is a sizable oval-shaped bay on the north-east section of the island. After a bit of exploring we headed over to the side of the bay to pick up the "Commodore Creek" water trail, which is essentially a water-path that winds its way through the mangroves swamp for maybe a mile or so.
Here we are out on Tarpon Bay getting the hang of our kayaks. Ethan and Amy were in their own boats; Lydia and I paddled together:
The edges of the bay are mainly mangroves; the water is very salty, so I don't think that much else would grow in this environment.
The roots are all covered with oysters and barnacles and other crustaceans:
Lydia with yours truly:
This fellow was sitting looking inscrutable; he didn't seem to mind my getting close to take his picture:
Fantastic bird-watching opportunities-- we saw all sorts of herons, egrets, and other birds, not to mention fish, crabs, and starfish. When we first set out, the guides told us that the tide was still coming in, and that we would have to wait a little in order to get all the way through the trail without getting stuck. The water was indeed a bit low in spots, but on the plus side, we had the place pretty much all to ourselves, which was great (much easier to sneak up on the birds that way). On our way out of the trail we hit a huge group of kayakers on their way in, which was further evidence that we'd hit the timing just right.
Lydia and I had a nice swim in the ocean in the afternoon. It took me a little while to get "nerved up" to get into the water; Lydia had no such qualms. The beach has a very shallow cutoff; you can walk quite a ways out before it gets too deep to stand.
Here's a photo of the Sanibel coastline-- this is looking east along the beach. Off in the distance you can see the main Florida coastline running north/south (with lots of big hotels and developments along the shore):
Lots, and lots, and lots of shells on the Sanibel beaches. You actually have to be careful when you are walking through the shallow water, though, since it's easy to step on shells this way (most of them "pen" shells, which are the big dark brown ones shown below, and Florida Fighting Conches).
You see these curious things every now and then while walking along the beach-- this is an egg casing from a Lightning Whelk. Each of the little segments is about the size of 3 or 4 quarters stacked together, and the entire string contains hundreds and hundreds of them. According to the video at the museum, the entire package (produced by a single whelk) has upwards of 10,000 babies.
Here is another curious sight that you see while walking on the beach-- this is an Austrialian pine tree, and the birds are actually pelicans. They look completely goofy perched up on the tops of the branches; they are big enough birds that the perches are very precarious):
Tuesday was shopping day; the Frances, Amy, and Lydia hopped in the car after a late breakfast and made their way off to a bunch of outlet stores a ways inland. I tried to rally the remaining troops for various expeditions of one sort or another, but without much luck: Ethan was completely engrossed in his book, and Paul also wanted to stay put, so we had a nice quiet morning and lunch. In the afternoon Ethan and I got on our bikes and headed out for a ride-- we had our eyes on the main "nature viewing" car/bike trail in the western part of the J Ding Darling park. Unfortunately we had equipment problems along the way; the bike I was riding kept on losing its chain. I was able to put it back on the first and second times, but the third time the chain wound up getting wedged between the cog and wheel, and I couldn't get it unstuck no matter how hard I yanked on it. Annoying, since we were pretty close to the entrance to the park at that point. I started walking my bike back homewards while Ethan cycled off to see if he could find help (Amy and Frances were back home at this point, but neither of them had their cell phones turned on). After a mile or so I was lucky enough to run into another cyclist who had some tools with him; I managed to get the wheel off and fix the chain once I had a wrench to work with. Ethan turned up again at that point; he had cycled over to a bike shop that we had seen earlier, but it had been closed. We decided to cut our losses, so we cycled back home, luckily with no more mishaps.
Nice dinner Tuesday night at "Gramma Dot's", a smaller place over by the marina. Good food (we ordered mostly shrimp and fish) and then some excellent key lime pie afterwards.
Lots of tennis this week in the mornings. Ethan and I played pretty much every day; Amy and Lydia played a bunch as well. For a while I thought that my backhand (always my worst stroke) was dead and gone, but it staged a miraculous recovery during the second half of the week. Ethan and I had some really good volleying sessions and played a few games as well. I'm glad we played in the early morning, though, since it was a pretty sweaty business even then. Photos:
Wednesday we decided that we would take a boat tour; Amy signed us up for a ride on a boat called the "Thriller", which takes you all the way around Sanibel and its neighbor island to the north, Captiva. The boat itself is a ferociously fast hydrofoil, very sleek, with 440-horsepower engines and a catamaran hull, with room for about 40 passengers. I was a little worried that we would be bounced all over the place and sprayed with salt water, but in fact the ride was pretty smooth, even when we were going all out (top speed is around 38-40mph). The other really neat thing about the ride is that the dolphins in the area have figured out that the stern wake from the boat is "fun". The captain would spot a pod of dolphins, slow the boat down to around 10mph, at which point the dolphins would zoom over and start surfing in the wake-- they get a sort of free ride if they are positioned just right at the top of the wake wave.
Watching the dolphins was really neat, especially since it was clear that they were having a ball zooming around, turning barrel rolls just underwater, doing flips, etc. There were even a couple of smaller babies / juveniles participating as well. The whole ride lasted about an hour and a quarter, which was about the right length of time all things considered.
There was also a woman on the boat acting as a tour guide; she gave us a running commentary on the sights and on the island history (using a somewhat over-powered P.A. system) while we zoomed along. The history of the island plays out more or less as one might expect: very sleepy and undeveloped back in the 1800s, eventually turning agricultural. Apparently it was a fantastic place for growing tomatoes during the winter season; tomatoes grown there would be shipped all over the country. This came to an end in 1926, when a big hurricane covered the entire island in about 10 feet of salt water, which pretty much ruined the soil. After that it was mainly a vacation place (accessible only by boat). In 1963 they built a causeway, at which point development and growth exploded, however unlike some other parts of Florida people eventually came to their senses and put in restrictions on things like building size (3 stories max now).
Wednesday in the afternoon we had a second attempt at doing the nature trail at the nature preserve; Ethan and I hopped on our bikes at around 1pm to start biking over there, then Amy + Lydia + Frances came a little later in the car. We got to the visitor's center around 1:30 and poked around there for a while. I hadn't realized it, but the wildlife preserve gets a phenomenal number of visitors: 800,000 a year. The visitor's center had some interesting material on Mr Darling himself, who as it turns out was a political cartoonist; the drawings we saw were terrific (most of them were conservation-oriented, but in a very early 20th-century way). The main nature "trail" turned out to be more of a road than a trail, set up for drivers and not walkers. This limited what you could see, but it was still a nice ride (albeit a bit bumpy) and gave us some nice views of the surrounding ponds, creeks, and swamps. Photos from the trip:
The trail (which is 1-way) eventually popped us out on the other side of the park; Ethan and I then had a rather hot and sweaty ride back to the center of town (we had a fairly stiff headwind). Ethan unfortunately managed to get sunburned on his face by the time we finally made it back around 4ish. When I quizzed him afterwards he told me that he had used some of the "regular" stuff instead of the super-strong Danish "P-20" that we normally use. Oh well, live and learn.
Thursday morning: more tennis! Ethan and I slugged it out on the courts while Lydia and Amy worked on the frosting for the birthday cake. Following the tennis Lydia and I made another trip to the grocery store to buy even more ingredients for making frosting (she wanted to put a "decorative" white layer on top of the base chocolate layer). We also made several attempts during the morning to set up a session to try "stand up paddle boarding". This is a newish thing involving a sort of over-sized surf board and long paddle; you stand on the board and paddle yourself around. Unfortunately the rental places we called said that there was too much "chop" on the water and that they weren't renting that day (oh well).
For lunch we decided to try "Cip's", which was actually not too bad (gumbo, grouper sandwiches). The salad that I ordered turned out to be one of the most unusual I've ever eaten; it featured fried green tomatoes in combination with arugula, feta, and olives (?). It was a good meal, though. In the afternoon we had an extended beach session; we bodysurfed, played frisbee, and then lay around on the sand doing our best imitation of mollusks. Beach photos:
Here are a couple of close-up photos of the ubiquitous Florida Fighting Conch. When you pick them up they don't seem especially combative, and it turns out that they are in fact vegetarians, unlike some of the the other more bloodthirsty mollusks we heard about. The "fighting" part comes from the fact that they have a longish and fairly strong "foot" that they can use to push themselves along if they are so inclined. I saw a little of this when I got up early one morning to go out and see the scene at low tide-- there were a couple dozen FFC's out on one section of the beach trying to "flop" their way along to wherever it was they were going.
We finally finished off with a dip in the the pool, aahhh.
For dinner Frances made baby back ribs (special request from Lydia) which were superbly delicious (yum), along corn, broccoli, salad, and slaw (not to mention cake for dessert).
After dinner Lydia opened birthday presents and we dined on the birthday cake she cooked:
Note the "checkerboard" pattern that you get when you cut a slice: Lydia picked the recipe especially since she liked this idea, but it meant baking three layers and "piping" the dough in circles in order to get the proper look. This has to be the most complicated cake that I've ever see anyone make while on a beach vacation, bar none:
Other misc Sanibel observations:
The bulk of the restaurants and shops in Sanibel are clustered in the middle along a stretch of Periwinkle way, which is a single lane road. This made for some pretty ferocious traffic jams (mainly in the afternoon and around lunch/dinner times). We got stuck there a number of times; you can tell that you are in a jam when you look over and you're being passed on the bike path by a couple of kids with training wheels :-).
Walking on the beach a Sanibel offers entertaining people-watching opportunities. While we were there we saw mostly (maybe 2/3?) older folks with the other 1/3 made up by families with kids. Almost nobody from the 18-25 year old demographic-- it was as little uncanny in that regard (my assumption was that everyone in that age group was over in places like Fort Lauderdale and Daytona Beach participating in the activities that go on there this time of year).
More photos:
Friday morning we had a brief but furious exercise session: Amy and Ethan hit the tennis courts while I went for a run. The south Florida humidity nearly did me in -- I was pretty wiped out when I finished my loop (maybe a little more than 5 miles, something like that). We then got cleaned up and packed up and ready to head off to the airport around 9.
Alas, the ride back to MA was not much fun. Delays due to a storm system, then when we finally did get in the air we wound being bounced around all over the place, so we were all rather queasy when we landed in Newark. We then had to wait around until 7, then got bumped around some more on our final leg to Boston. So maybe not the most pleasant day traveling I've ever had, but we did finally get home around 11. Whew. It was good to sleep in our own beds again.
Back at home: still no snow! This has definitely been a weird winter with respect to the lack of white stuff on the ground. It's good to have a couple of days to do laundry and house projects before launching right back into the work-and-school routine, though.
