Florida Summer Trip - Day 1

We arrived in Florida after a fairly early morning flight direct to Fort Meyers.  We were quickly aware of the heat as we walked to our car rental, but that was much to be expected.  And after a quick stop at a Colorado favorite Chick-Fil-A, we drove the 20 miles out over a large causeway and onto Sanibel Island.  We picked up our keys from the property management office (without even having to show any sort of identification or paperwork) and dropped all of our belongings inside.  This is a picture from approximately 15 minutes after we arrived at our actual house.  As you can see, getting to the beach certainly didn't take long! 

Tara quickly found a "public" umbrella to sit under and also got settled right in.  We later found that these umbrellas were actually carried there in the morning by people staying at these condos that bordered the beach.  Our place was close, but actually about 50 yards behind these condos.  In the end, it was about a 45 second walk from our doorstep to the beach front.  Not bad by any measure!

The water was nice and warm, quite the opposite of the west coast and the much farther up the eastern coast.  It was close to the temperature of a warm bath and the waves were fairly mild.  Some days had bigger waves than others but in general 1-3 foot waves were as big as they got.

As you can start to see in this picture, the beaches in Sanibel are world renown for seashells.  The lower parts of all the beaches were almost all varying degrees of crushed shells.  Finer sand could usually be found quite a bit back from the shore but mostly it was just seashells.  

After several hours in the sun, we decided to venture into the local restaurant scene and try out our first choice: The Island Cow.  This was a fairly eclectic place but our first indication that it was going to be good was the fact that it was totally packed.  We had to wait almost 40 minutes that first night and were getting totally eaten by mosquitoes or other biting bugs, but finally got in on some down right decent food.  Tara made sure to partake in some tasty fresh fish (we think it was Red Snapper) being this close to the ocean.