Fort Myers Beach

This year, for our warm, get the heck out of New England, vacation we decided to go to Fort Myers Beach. It was intended as a beach vacation and we had started looking further north in the Clearwater area. The temperature there didn't seem like they'd be quite warm enough so south we went. It wasn't part of the plan, but it was a bonus that Red Sox spring training was in session.

We stayed at the Pink Shell Beach Resort on Fort Myers Beach. The resort was nice, although I felt it was lacking in some details. I know it sounds strange, but it almost felt like it was run by people who had seen a resort in a movie once, but didn't really have a lot of experience doing it. But overall it was very nice, and we had a very good stay.

We didn't do a lot of running around like we normally do, which was intentionally. We spent a lot of time by the pool or on a beach. We did visit a few places.

The Naples Zoo was nice but pretty small. It was a little expensive for the experience, but it was a nice half-day trip. Poor Abigail got bitten by an ant during lunch so Abigail may not have enjoyed it very much.

We went to Red Sox spring training. That was the most interesting activity we did. The new place is really nice. Although we never saw the old place. We got to see some of the players and took a tour of Fenway South. the only downside was it was HOT and poor Abigail was wilting.

On the way back from jetBlue park, we stopped at Manatee Park. Unfortunately with the unusually hot weather this year, all the manatees were comfortably out in the Gulf of Mexico and didn't need the additional heat of the power plant here. We did learn about manatees though.

We took a day trip to Sanibel and Captiva islands. It was a nice trip but driving was SLOW. Lots of traffic going in, more traffic coming out. Looking for shells was fun and we had a nice relaxing lunch at R.C. Otters on Captiva. After driving around looking for a parking spot for 20 minutes...

We spent most of our time on Fort Myers Beach (the island, not the actual beach) and enjoyed it. It's an odd sort of place with a wide range of visitors. The food on the island was ok, but mostly touristy. The one decent restaurant we found was Bayfront Bistro. We went there twice. I recommend it to anyone. We also like Nervous Nellies and amazingly enough, eating at Bongo's on the pool deck at the resort was very good, too.

All in all, a successful trip that was too short.