Their condo was facing the water, nice nice nice. Annalise eats her breakfast while watching the tide.
I love swim shirts! Both of my kids have them - not because I love them, it's more that I love them because they have them. I didn't realize how much easier applying sunscreen would be when 85% of their body is already covered! Awesome!So on the pier at Ft. Myers Beach there is this huge sign of rules for fishing on the pier. Basically all of the rules are different variations of "DO NOT fish for sharks!" And what did an 8 year old boy reel in right in front of our condo the very next day?
You can see the kid's shoe in the picture for size reference - it wasn't Jaws! But it isn't a nurse shark. It's a black-tipped reef shark, which Rob says, "isn't dangerous", but I am not convinced! The day before Caleb and I had waded out to about 2 feet deep and I stepped on something that wasn't small enough to be a starfish, wasn't flat enough to be a stingray, wasn't hard enough to be a shell, but whatever it was it moved rapidly when I stepped on it! And so did we...back to the sand!
Playing under the pier (at low tide!)
I didn't realize that the tide time changes each day. Unfortunately I didn't learn that until about the 5th day, so each day I anticipated low tide to be at the same time it was the day before and it kept changing! Rob said the tides are 13 hours apart.
Caleb at a restaurant overlooking the pier.
Caleb was fascinated with this giant beer bottle at a Mexican restaurant we went to.
Our friend Libby lives on Ft. Myers Beach. She let us borrow beach toys and fish on her pier. The kids thought her pink flamingo was funny :)
Brian taught Annalise to lean on her fist and say, "Hmmmmm..."
...and Uncle Brian let this kids "play" his guitar.
We also went to Calusa Nature Center - where they had a butterfly aviary! Most of the butterflies in the aviary were Zebra Longwings. They are the next kind of butterfly I want to attract to my garden. Their caterpillars eat passion flower vine and they are Florida's "State Butterfly". They are also very hard to take a picture of in flight!
Screech Owl at Calusa. We also visited Ostego Bay Marine Center and Koreshan State Park. Both of them were interesting places. The marine center is not very big and didn't seem that impressive up front, but we got a very thorough tour and they had a lot of interesting displays about local marine life.Koreshan State Park is a park and campground on the site of a religious settlement that existed in the early part of the 1900s. It was called Koreshanity and was sort of a mix of beliefs. A lot of their buildings are still standing and are in pretty good shape. They lived communistically - members had to give up their property and live on common land. They also were celibate, so they are pretty much all gone.
On our last day there, we went to Sanibel Island and went swimming. Sanibel is so different from Ft. Myers Beach! It is just littered with shells. There are a lot of shells on Ft. Myers Beach too, but so many more on Sanibel.
My dad brought his snorkel and mask. While he was snorkeling, something washed into his hands, he said he as kind of nervous about what it was, but when he looked - it was a nice pair of swimming goggles! Even though they don't know how to swim yet, Annalise and Caleb were very excited!
Buried in the sand - my mom did this work ;) Annalise was just inspecting.
Found this sign upon entering the beach, they don't have a sign like this on Ft. Myers Beach, but I didn't seen any nude bathers there either ... makes you wonder why they'd need such a sign!
