Today is our last day here in Fort Myers. The ten days has gone by in a whirlwind! Tomorrow we drive away to the northeast side of Florida in the Daytona Beach area (we’ll be at the Harris Village RV Park in Ormand Beach, Florida). We’ll be there for a week.
We went to Church today at the Bonita Springs Ward. This was a very nice (and small) ward. There were a number of visitors there along with us. We enjoyed the meetings as well as the drive back home along the beach roads.
We’ve spent a fair amount of time at the beaches … with the best times at the beaches on Sanibel and Captiva Islands. Yesterday afternoon we spent a couple of hours at the beach on Captiva where we experienced a magnificent sunset. I set up my ham radio equipment and played radio for about an hour. I did make one contact in New Jersey but otherwise wasn’t able to get through the pileups because I could only operate at low power from a battery I carted to the beach.
On Friday we drove up to Sarasota to the Ringling Estate (from the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus). We spent several hours on the Ringling estate and found we didn’t have nearly enough time. Anyone going should allow one day just for the art gallery! After that we drove up to Clearwater to meet with AJ and Skip Starkey, some dear friends from our days in Chardon. Skip and I served together as counselors under Bishop RIch McClellan. We moved to Utah and Skip became bishop of that ward for 7 1/2 years. We had a great time talking about what’s happened since then and reliving memories from back then. We got home just about 10 pm after a delightful day.
We’ve had a good time here in southwest Florida. Nina has been able to collect a number of sea shells, but probably hasn’t been able to spend nearly enough time at the beach of collecting shells. I’ve found that I really like the Florida area, although I think Sarasota is a better location overall. The big draw for Fort Myers is Sanibel and Captiva islands.
We haven’t had time to do some of the things we’d thought we would do, such as drive down to Key West and go to the Fort Lauderdale Temple. That just means we’ll have to come back!
I’ve put together a photo gallery from the past few days.
