Instead of buying Christmas presents for each other, Brian and I went back to Sanibel Island. We flew out of Toledo into Punta Gorda. My Dad dropped us off at the airport the morning of Friday, January 24. It was -5F and the snow was blowing across the tundra/runway. I was coming off of night shift, and the day ended up a very long day after our flight was delayed 3 hours. Going through TSA at tiny airports goes really fast, and the inside is nice since nobody is ever there.
We got to Punta Gorda right at sunset, and we were comfortable in pants and hoodies, so that was pretty amazing. After fending off the up-sell at Hertz, we stopped at Ruby Tuesday (so authentic?) and crossed the Causeway to Sanibel. We got to our hotel, Sunset Beach Inn, around 10pm.
Here’s our room, which was not beachfront because we booked it so late:
Here’s the view of the Gulf from our room (looking right from our room):
This hotel was quiet and nice. It wasn’t terribly warm while we stayed there – it seemed the warmest around 10am and then seemed chilly. I still walked the beach some and loitered in the sun making Vitamin D.
Looking back towards our room from the pool area:
This hotel was the furthest west we have stayed on Sanibel, so the view of the sunset was everything promised by the name of the hotel.  I waited the sunset out on Saturday, going to this weird grass roofed hut from the pool area:
A panoramic photo of the late afternoon sun:
A seagull on the beach:
Sun getting lower in the sky:
Sunsetting photos:
My favorite picture, post-sunset:
The next morning, I got up and walked on the beach for a bit, and I also went up stairs at the hotel to take a couple of pictures:
I took this picture for Chiara, so Australia:
Look, we’re at the intersection of Bunny and Rabbit!
Monday, we had to change hotels, because neither hotel had a spot the whole week for us. We went to the Naples Zoo to occupy ourselves between checkout and checkin. The Naples Zoo is small and does not have a huge number of animals, but it is very nice. There are also some really nice plants, as the zoo’s roots were as botanist Dr. Henry Nehrling’s gardens. The gardens were neglected after Nehrling’s death, but they were reopened in 1954, and animals were added when a couple of collectors sought a winter home for their collection of exotic animals. The land was privately owned until the mid-aughts, when Collier County purchased the land, though the zoo’s operations are not taxpayer-funded. There are many signs in the zoo warning you that you will miss half the zoo if you don’t go to the scheduled Meet the Keeper talks or the main Safari Canyon presentations. I think if you didn’t make a point of going to those things, you could get through the zoo in less than an hour, but it would be a really nice hour.
One thing that is interesting about a Southern Florida zoo is that they have to devote very little space or expense to indoor viewing for animals. The animals generally have some kind of shed or small enclosure that the animals could go in short-term in a storm or cold snap, but there aren’t really buildings. This is, of course, in contrast to our northern zoos where animals have indoor and outdoor areas and spend a good amount of time indoors during the year.
Anyway, onward to the animals! A beautiful Malayan tiger, much smaller than our Siberian Tigers:
An animal we had never seen before, a fossa!
Hyenas:
Gator feeding time (which the gators don’t really care about because it’s cold outside and they’re slow and trying to bask in the sun):
Brian likes these cavies:
Here’s a sign about the botanist that started it all:
They have a bachelor herd of 7 giraffes at Naples Zoo. They are quite charming, and the Zoo allows you to purchase lettuce and feed them. We went to a Meet the Keeper talk, where the keeper fed these cute dudes:
Cutest sloth ever. Too bad Kristen Bell was nowhere to be found:
Naples Zoo is one of only 4 North American Zoos with Honey Badgers. Honey badgers were busy and what not:
Here’s a leopard:
Even though you can’t really tell from these weird reflecty photos, the Naples Zoo had the cleanest glass of any Zoo I’ve ever been to. You go, Naples Zoo. Also of note, try typing Naples Zoo over and over again. I can guarantee you will type Naplez almost every time.
Here’s a cool pen I bought there:
We went to our second hotel, the Sanibel Inn, and our room wasn’t ready. We were told they “overbooked” and instead of the beachfront room I had booked and was looking forward to, we were being “upgraded” to a 2 bedroom condo. Immediately, I was suspicious, as when I booked the room, two things in the description were notably important to me: it was recently renovated, and THE PANORAMIC BEACHFRONT VIEW. The girl at the desk assured me that the view from our room would be just as good. You can review this map of the grounds and know that this was bullshit, as we were in the Bromeliad building, rather than the ones ON THE BEACH:
We went to the room, and I was super disappointed. First of all, just in general, there were two of us, so having two bedrooms and two bathrooms wasn’t really a tradeoff for the view, etc., but the room itself was gross. It was last renovated when Golden Girls was on the air, and things were dirty, tired, gross, etc., and the view was not very good. I went back to the desk and asked about moving, even changing a different day, and was told there was no way for us to move.
Here are some pics of a grody condo that people have paid $600 to stay in (not us, we got the rate for the room we booked, or I might have lost my mind)…gross bathrooms with oh-so-fancy shell sinks, dirty carpet, dirty 1980s bedspreads (a bed that I found a bug in), old cream colored appliances and shitty formica counters, rusty mini-blinds, dirty couch, etc:
This is the view from the patio, which is certainly not panoramic:
Here’s what you definitely want to see in your hotel room:
So I spent a lot of time trying to find somewhere else for us to stay the rest of the time before I finally fell asleep, but I couldn’t really find anything.
The next morning (Tuesday), we went on an adventure to get out of our stupid hotel room…to the Everglades Wonder Gardens!
This attraction has a very rich history (you can tell because, on the whole, it needs to be powerwashed), which is possibly its most important asset. It was basically a privately owned roadside zoo – lots of huge animals in small enclosures, once upon a time. Then the owner died and the Wonder Gardens closed briefly. Supposedly, the property is still up for sale, but a wildlife photographer and his family have an agreement with the family of the old proprietor to use the land as more of a botanical garden and community center.
The plant life is amazing at EWG, but the signage for it is lacking. We learned at the Naples Zoo that 90% of people don’t read the signs…so maybe it’s good business sense starting out to not pour money into signs.
More on the topic of signs – some of the most interesting things to me were really old signs – there’s a really old painted sign about the EWG on the front of the entrance house (that is partially obscured because it promises a guide-led tour during your visit), and tucked behind some of the old skeletons and relics from past years at EWG was a cool painted map of the grounds showing what animals used to live where. It has been not-so-carefully updated over the years, but it would be amazing to have someone restore it to its original state to see it and marvel at the history of the grounds. It would be really cool if they made a video where a zookeeper-type went through the map/grounds and talked about how wrong the gardens used to be, based on what we know now – but that would surely put their relationship with the owning family at risk, I guess.
Anyway, it’s a nice enough place, and beyond the plants, they still have some animals. During our last trip to Florida, the only alligator we saw was the maimed one at the Slough…this trip, we saw SO many alligators between the Zoo and the Wonder Gardens:
There was a suspension bridge over the Gator enclosure, which was pretty cool:
There was a bird enclosure with unlabeled birds. Here’s Brian’s favorite duck:
Last trip, flamingos were on the list of goal animals, but we didn’t see any. The Wonder Gardens have the only flamingos in SW Florida:
There were some really cool turtles:
Also, we finally saw a gopher tortoise (in a weird old enclosure that made taking pictures difficult):
Brian by a really cool tree:
We fed swimming turtles $1 worth of turtle food, which was the best ever, and then made our way out of the Wonder Gardens.
Once we got back on the road, I noticed this dude:
He rode there, with occasionally yells from us to stop moving, until we got to Castle Golf, which was probably 45 minutes. I’m sure (hoping) he’s enjoying life on a miniature golf course. Here he is before I picked him up and let him go at the fence:
We enjoyed a round of Castle Golf, and I beat Brian by 2 or 3 shots:
Tuesday was the nicest weather day of our trip, so after we got back we went for a pretty long walk. This is a pretty picture I took:
So when we got back from the walk, I went to talk to the girl at the desk again (of course it was the same girl), and I basically said, “The room you put us in is gross.” She was pretty defensive. I asked about moving to another property owned by the same company, and she acted like I was the biggest moron in morontown, since those properties are smaller than Sanibel Inn. Anyway, she finally said, “To move you, I’d have to move somebody else around.” She was talking about people who weren’t there yet, so I don’t know why that would matter at all. Then she said, “All of them will have dirty carpet right now,” (OK?) and “If you’re that concerned with the decor, there’s one I can move you too, but I have to call and see if it’s clean.” YES. Anyway, after a bunch of rigmarole, I had a keycard to this other condo so we could see if we wanted to move into it. Brian and I walked in and LOLed. This place was SO nice, I’m pretty sure we were being punk’d. So fancy, such an improvement, etc.:
Everything was better after we moved. It was fortunate that I felt more comfortable and less disappointed in the new digs, since the weather wasn’t that great the last 2 days, so we did spend more time inside than we might have.
Wednesday morning, we were going to go to the garden tour at a neighboring hotel, but I didn’t RSVP before enough old people, so the tour was full. That was kind of a bummer, but then I read more reviews that talked about how the gardener lady keeps the tour small so that everyone can talk and ask questions about their own gardens…so the old people might have been insufferable. Instead, we went to Ding Darling Refuge. We started in the Visitor Center, which was very nice, and then walked 4 miles on a trail where we saw very few animals (we “just missed” a gator and saw several ducks and some other birds). We went back and waited around during the afternoon because Amandita was going to come and have dinner/hang out with us. YAY! We went to dinner, got ice cream, and then watched a show called “My Dirty Little Secret” on Discovery ID, starring none other than disgraced UT cross country coach Kevin Hadsell (you might know him by his acting name, Kevin Barbaro). He likes a good eyebrow raise and sitting with one leg up in bed with boxers on, we learned.
Thursday, it was chillier and rainy all day. I sat on the porch with a blanket off one of the unused twin beds in the morning. I saw an egret roaming around in the courtyard:
We went to the Center for Rehabilitation of Wildlife’s visitor center. They treat all sorts of injured animals from all over SW Florida (the hospital part is off limits, but the educational visitor center was pretty cool). Some of the information, including photograph and XRays, was pretty graphic…which is probably good, since most of the injuries are the fault of humans somehow.
Some of the reviews complained about how you couldn’t view any animals, there was nothing to see, really boring, etc. It reminded me of when you see trashy people dragging their kids through a zoo and never reading signs with them or talking about human impact on animal habitats or risk of extinction…or really any of the things that make zoos valuable. That’s the stuff that can make a zoo, or something like this, valuable. I know some people are weird about animals being closed into zoos…and that’s cool, but if you think about all the good that can come out of a zoo – young people’s interest in animals, biology, etc., conservation efforts, awareness of all the amazing animals that are out there, and what the human impact on different habitats and animals is, what we can do to help, etc., it’s at least not all bad. Anyway, to further that thought, this was a quote that I liked that was on the wall at the CROW:
After the CROW, we drove the loop at Ding Darling in light rain. We saw a couple of birds worth seeing.
Here’s a guide:
Roseate Spoonbills:
We took a semi-terrible couple picture:
We went to She Sells Seashells and bought two tiny starfish and two tiny sea biscuits and some other junk. The guy threw in the shiny shells you see in this picture, as well as the weird blob that doesn’t look particularly shell-like. The rest are Sanibel seashells:
I went out to the beach in the rain. Pictures from that walk…my feet in the Gulf:
Birds and things:
A selfie I took on the beach:
Panoramic of a rainy day:
Looking back out toward the beach:
That night, we missed our second home Lady Rockets game in 4 seasons – and possibly the worst game the Ladies have ever played at home. We tried to watch and listen to the game from our room, and eventually we abandoned it and went out to eat. Sad panda.
When I got out of the shower, I had a message that our flight home was delayed approximately 30 hours. By that point, 1) we missed our cats, 2) wanted to be home, 3) had spent a ton of money, 4) weren’t sure our cats or the house would survive more Matthew time…so after spending more than 2 hours overall with Allegiant to get a refund, we booked a flight out of Fort Myers into Detroit Friday at 6am (luckily my Dad is still off from his surgery and could come get us). It made our rental car 50% more expensive since it became one-way, and our flights were more expensive…but it was worth it, even though we got about an hour and a half of sleep before we had to leave for the airport. The plane wasn’t very full and we left RSW early, so we were on the ground in Detroit before 9am. When we got home, there was cat shit and pee on the stairs, tufts of cat hair EVERYWHERE, and I found several doses of cat medicine that had been spit out (the cats tongue their meds). So we cleaned the house and did all sorts of laundry and bought groceries, etc.
Anyway. I’m off this week too, so I suppose we actually could have stayed longer. I really wanted to be home to go to the Lady Rockets vs. Bowling Green game on Groundhog Day. It was a nice relaxing week, even though it wasn’t super warm. It certainly was much warmer than here.
