We were tired of winter so we decided to go to some place warm. Sitting on a couple of use or loose round trip credits from Southwest we started checking out their destinations. We wanted to be on the water someplace, preferably by the ocean. Our first considerations were southern California or Florida. We ruled out SoCal because all we found online were mega-resorts and high rise development. The Miami Beach salsa scene didn’t seem quite right for us. Looking at the Southwest vacation packages there was one for Fort Meyers, FL. Neither of us had been to FL and after a bunch of internet research we thought Sanibel Island looked pretty cool.
After a bunch of arm wrestling with Southwest we finally came up with a couple of RT’s from Boise to Tampa Bay. Now we had to come up with a place to stay. I found a great forum, http://forum.bestofsanibelcaptiva.com and read the whole thing. Next I started cruising the Vacation Rentals By Owner, aka http://www.vrbo.com/. It was overwhelming, there are 1000’s of condos listed for rent, everything from $5k per night to dumps. A lot of the recommendations on the forums had statements like “can’t go wrong with the Shalimar” and “there’s always the Shalimar”. The Shalimar is a 1950’s place that has been wonderfully maintained, http://www.shalimar.com. It’s not cheap but it looked like our kind of place. We stayed in a motel unit the first night and then we moved into an ocean front cabin for the rest of our stay.
The cabin was perfect, really cool and way closer to the ocean than any of the 100’s of nearby condos. The property was grandfathered in and exempted from the beach setbacks that regulate all of the newer places. People really did come up to us as we sat on the beach in our plastic Adirondack chairs and asked about the cabin. It has one bedroom with a living area and dining table and a little galley kitchen. It had a screened in porch all along the back facing the ocean, great place for dinners and morning coffee.
Sanibel Island is know as the seashell “place” of North America. I ordered a couple of old National Geo’s off of Ebay with articles about seashells and Sanibel Island, March 1969 and July 1949. Reading the advertisements in the ‘49 issue was like opening a time capsule from when J and I were born. The beaches on Sanibel consist totally of seashells and crushed seashells. The tide eddies pile up mounds of small shells literally by the millions. Every morning there is a scattered line of beachcombers, heads down eyes on the ground scanning the new deposits from the last high tide for the Hope diamond of the seashell world, a junonia (National Geo, July 1949, p. 43).
The air was warm, the water was warm and the sun was hot; perfect escape from winter. Every day we played in the water, sat on the beach and watched the pelicans and sailboats, thoroughly enjoying ourselves.
Our daily routine became very simple. Up just after the sun and sit on the porch with a cup of coffee and just watch the ocean colors change or maybe a porpoise splash. Go for a swim and play in the water and waves. Sit on the beach and sun dry. The big decision of the day was what kind of ultra-fresh fish to get at Bailey’s General Store, http://www.baileys-sanibel.com/. The place is great, everything from groceries to new sinks to you name it. Idaho is not really know as a seafood hotspot, Bailey’s is. Grouper, gulf shrimp, swordfish, everything we bought was delicious. A sunset dinner of sauteed grouper on the porch was exactly how life is supposed to be.
I like to fish and I brought along some travel tackle just in case. There were a few people along the beach with lines in the water. At first I had no idea about the local technique. After wasting a day I kind of spied on the people that seemed to have a clue and then went to the general store and bought the appropriate terminal tackle. There was a shallow cut only a foot or two deep right off the beach. When the tide was moving we could see snook fining through the baby waves.
Seems I attracted a couple of fishing buddies. Earl was first on the scene. Now Earl was a very, very patient egret. He would stand there for hours, two or three feet away staring at me. After Earl’s novelty wore off Jennifer thought he was strange but he didn’t really bother me, standing and staring …………and staring. My second fishing buddy was this 12 yr old kid whose mom smoked cigars. He would sit on the sand and tell me about cast netting shrimp and other fishing sagas.
The fishing turned out to be really good on a moving tide casting no more than 20 ft. into the little cut. I caught a crab, catfish, grey mullet, sheepshead, sea trout (good eating BTW), and finally on the last day a snook which went totally ballistic when I hooked it. Oh, I also caught a big ass stingray. Probably 10 lbs. plus, it pulled like hell and I finally cut the line 3 or 4 ft up not wanting any part of its stinger. The kid was pretty jacked up that “we” caught a ray.
A big chunk of Sanibel Island’s 21,000 acres is occupied by the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge. After a drive over the bridge to Captiva Island we decided to check out the refuge on the way back to our cabin. There is only one road with points of interest along the way. We picked up a self-tour brochure at the visitor’s center and set off. The whole place is a huge mangrove swamp with birds every place. At the POI’s there are boardwalks that you can walk into the jungle and out over the swamp. We saw a bunch of two ft long grey mullet schooling along. Neither of us had ever seen an environment anything like this brackish swamp with an impenetrable wall woven by the mangrove’s aerial roots. Definitely the “Ding” is a must see if your ever there and next time I’m going to bring a rod and try to catch a couple of those big mullet.
One day we went down to the farmer’s market in the parking lot of the public library. It was great. We bought fresh tuna steaks and a home made fresh mozzarella and pancetta roll that the guy said it took ten beers to make the night before. There was a plant stall where we picked up a 4” pot of basil and vine ripe tomatoes with old days taste. The market goodies all came together for a great dinner that night with tuna steaks grilled medium rare and to die for caprese salad. Pleasantly full and sitting on the beach with J. watching another mesmerizing sunset the evening air sort of wrapped around us, warm and a little humid.
We were sad to go home. You know you’ve had a really good trip when you are sad to go home. The subtropical weather helped us shake off the winter blahs. We would have had a good time staying in a condo but the cabin at Shalimar really pushed it over the top for us. Playing in the gulf, sitting on the beach, fishing with Earl, checking out the west Florida coast; it was a perfect get away. We couldn’t have scripted it any better.
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