The Urban Pantheist

I go to the Cape once a year--a coworker opens his family's house up to the zoo staff for a week. This time my 36 hour visit coincided with the Summer Solstice. Here's the bay side beach showing an awful lot of low tide.

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Our last stop on the vacation was the Edison and Ford Winter Estates. I was keen to see the botanical laboratories and such, not so much the big houses of two rich men I don't particularly admire. Edison was a ruthless capitalist and elephant electrocutor and Ford was a noted anti-Semite. We saw some cool stuff there though--check out the tree behind this statue of Edison.

I made sure to show my dad the Oatmeal strip about Tesla, after we got back, just so you know.
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Arr! or something. I told my dad he needs a bandana and a hoop earring and we could make a lot of friends in Florida.

We spent some time trying to "find" Fort Myers. Gertrude Stein may have lamented that "there's no there there" about her home town of Oakland, but I've heard it more accurately applied to other places. We tried in vain to find a town center, walkable village, or cohesive sense of Fort Myers that we could understand as New Englanders. One time I set the GPS for Centennial Park, in "downtown" Fort Myers. There were tall buildings and a park, but we didn't stay long. This laughing gull gave us a funny look as we looked across to the hotels of North Fort Myers where spent the night.

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The beaches at Sanibel and nearby Fort Myers Beach, I noticed, are composed mostly of the surf-ground skeletons of bivalve mollusks. It ranges from unbelievably fine, to entire shells.

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A quick snapshot before lunch, then off to Sanibel and Captiva!
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After some lunch we went looking for more hiking trails. We were traveling on the Tamiami Trail between Ochopee and Naples, but damned if I can find this boardwalk on google maps. There was a small Native American gift shop, "closed due to death in the family," by the trailhead. We encountered several birders on our way.

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Well, I've let a week go by and I have hundreds of vacation photos. Fortunately there's Facebook so you don't have to see tons of pics of me and my dad drinking and whatnot. Unless you want to in which case you should Friend me. (message me so I know who you are please).


At the end of our first day we wandered Fort Myer's Beach. We went to a bar on the water and watched the sunset at this bridge--under which an osprey was building or fortifying a nest. It was perched at the top of the mast of the boat at the far right of the photo.


Here's a close up of a sign on the nearby dock. Can this be real? Is there a place where you can sit and drink beer as huge fish eagles build nests over your head and sea monsters stir lazily below?

As I said earlier, I have redacted what occurred in the pub-crawl/tiki bar hours, and will finish our remembrance of FMB this way:

With a black vulture perched over the only road out of town.

We were here.

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My Father, my brother and my brother's kids are in Vancouver (the big city in Canada, not the island nor the city in Washington). I looked at my old posts from me and my dad's trip there, (to recommend stuff to my non-vacation-planning family) and discovered that I had friends-locked most of them. I think I was shy about posting vacation pics at that time, possibly because I'd just been put in the LJ Spotlight. Whatever; My vacation pics from the most urban naturey of urban places are totally relevant to anyone who is reading this now.

If you'd like to relive my vacation from 7 years ago, Please do: Seattle, Victoria, Vancouver.

In other news, the Canadian border authorities allowed my dad into Canada with an expired passport, the fun will come when they try to pass back into the United States!