Sanibel Island Vacation Diary - Day 2Click the audio controls below to start the audio diary. The button in the center is the play button. You can control the volume with the slider on the left. The transcript is also included below. [16 minutes, 41 seconds]
Susan: By 9:00. Fred: By 9:00 she says. So once I got up and Susan came in from the beach, we decided to go have breakfast, or lunch, whichever way you want to look at it, at one of our favorite places to eat, which is the Lighthouse Café. That is really one of the best places to eat on the island if you ask me. Their food is consistently good. Simple meals. They do breakfast right. They also have lunch menus. They don't serve dinner. It can get pretty busy, so you may have to wait if you're not running ahead of the crowd just a little bit. I'm sure during the really heavy seasons, they have waits that are extensive. We waited a couple of times in the past for maybe up to thirty minutes, but the good thing is that there are a couple of stores right next door and you can go shop in those while you wait because they have a loud speaker that you can hear inside the stores. They'll announce who's up next for a seat and that's real convenient if your having to wait very long. Susan: My meal consisted of three slices of some wonderful French Toast, sausage links and unsweetened ice tea. They have the most awesome French toast here. It was the best I've ever had anywhere I've ever eaten. Fred had the granola raisin pancakes, a side of potatoes and sausage links. His meal was also good with unsweetened iced tea. So our meals were good. We enjoyed it. It's always consistent, it's always good. Fred: I'll just add to that; my pancakes also had sliced bananas on them. I don't normally eat that on pancakes, but I really enjoyed that. I guess the meal cost was about $21 plus tip, so that's not bad for a couple of people having a very good meal. We probably will eat there, I'd say four or five meals the whole time we're here. Probably we eat there more than we do anywhere else, 'cause it's good for breakfast or lunch. Susan: After we were done eating, we came back to the condo and Fred got into his bathing suit. I already had mine on and we just freshened up and we went out to the beach and we had two umbrellas that we sit under because the sun is very intense here and it was an absolutely beautiful day. We people watched and read books, magazines and just enjoyed being at such a beautiful beach. Fred: If you're going to stay at a place where they don't provide umbrellas and if you're actually driving here and you can bring those sorts of things with you. 'Course you can get them here, but if you're bringing them with you, one of the things you might want to try to find in your local stores is a, I guess you can call it an "auger." It's a little thing that you can sort of drill down into the sand. It's almost like a drill bit on the end so that it can go down into the sand. You just twist it around until it goes down in. Probably about a foot and then you drop your umbrella stand into that and there's a little bolt that you can tighten on the side with your hands and that will keep your umbrella from blowing away. The wind can get pretty heavy here at times and that will be a problem if you don't get your umbrella secured down in the sand. So look for one of those locally or you can get them at most any store. We were at CVS last night and I saw them there. I didn't notice the price. I think they're probably about $5. Susan thinks it's less than that. So look for one of those. We saw somebody today who was actually lashing their umbrella to their chair with some rope and then another person's umbrella blew out of the sand and I had to chase it down for them. So, get one of those auger things and make sure your umbrellas are planted firmly in the sand. I guess about 4:00, 4:30; I'm not sure when we decided we'd had enough sun for the day and we packed it on in and had a little rest after being on the beach for so long and then about 5:30 we decided we'd go ahead and get to dinner. Around here, it can get pretty busy at some of the restaurants, especially right at 6:00. A lot of kids here and so the parents are always trying to get their kids to the restaurants early. We decided to go to a place called the Island Cow --which is really one of my favorite places. I'm not sure if Susan is as enthralled with it as I am, but I really like it. They have a huge menu with just about any kind of food that you want. It's a casual place. It's a kid friendly place, obviously with a cow theme. It's a brightly decorated place and they have indoor and outdoor seating. They had a guy there last night playing some music in the outdoor section. Anyway, we had a good meal there. I had a steak, barbeque sandwich. I didn't realize when I ordered that it was actually a steak just cooked and then put on a bun, so be careful about that, but they have lots of barbeque, they have different types of, obviously, fish and baskets with fries and your choice of entrée, whether it be sandwiches or fish or chicken. You name it, they pretty much have it. I believe they serve breakfast as well. One of my favorite things is when you sit down, they bring some muffins to your table. I believe they're all muffins that are sweet muffins. They put something in them. So those are really excellent. We had to wait, probably about 20 minutes and that's what they told us when we walked in. They have a waiting area on the outside of one side of the restaurant. Plenty of room and lots of seats, so it's comfortable while you're waiting. I believe dinner there was around $31. They also have t-shirts. There's a little room you can go in and buy t-shirts and polos a couple of other knickknacks that have the Island Cow logo and other fun things printed on them, so be sure and check that out. After we ate, we decided we would go out, just drive out to the end of Sanibel Island and see what damage we could note from the hurricane. We drove on out and we noticed that there was a good bit of change in the landscape, the "treescape", on the way out. Although, once you get past the commercial area of Sanibel and get more in the residential area, there was not as much of the Australian Pines hanging over the road. We couldn't notice as much of the damage, but you could note that there were houses that you could never see before that you could now see and there is one area where there's a mangrove out in the little bay area that you could never see that before, but now you could see it and also you could tell that the mangrove, part of it was just obliterated, so there's definitely going to be a lot of re-growth that's going to have to take place there if it can recover. When you get to the end of Sanibel, there's Captiva Island. You take a bridge over to Captiva Island. It's just a short bridge. In fact, the islands have joined over the last few years, the separation between the two islands had filled in with sand. When we first began going to Sanibel, ten years ago, there were two truly separate islands and you could go boating between them and there was a very fast flowing current that was separating the two islands and the bridge was a legitimate bridge going over water. However now, it is totally filled in with sand and even from last year, after the hurricane, I can tell that quite a bit of sand, even larger amounts of sand have filled in to the point where the sand is almost up to the bottom of the bridge. You can still walk under the bridge, but it's really within feet of the bridge. The worst hit place on Captiva was the South Seas Plantation Resort. It is still closed as of today, which is ten months after the hurricane hit. They're apparently having to just rebuild the whole place and start over, so we were able to drive up and just see the gate. We couldn't see anything from where we were. It's too far to where any of the buildings were to see anything . . . but anyway, it looks like life is resuming out there. Lots of construction still going on. Homes are being rebuilt or refurbished. So life will return to normal. Once we finished driving to the end of Captiva, we came back and we parked at that bridge that I mentioned earlier. It's called Blind Pass and it's a great place to stop and park. There's a parking lot on either side of the bridge, the Captiva side or the Sanibel side and you can park there. There's paid parking; you have to pay between 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. You can pay or you can actually get a decal, I believe from the police department, which we had done in past years, but now that they have a pay-as-you-go parking machine, you don't need to get a sticker unless you plan to stay there multiple times. I'm not sure of the hourly rate, because we got there after 7:00 p.m. and so we didn't have to pay. Just pay attention to that. If you're after 7:00 p.m., you don't have to pay. So we parked and then walked out to the beach. You'll see some video and some pictures on the site. It's just absolutely gorgeous, beautiful place. Great place to watch the sunset, listen to the waves and a really good place to find shells. We've spent many an hour there looking for shells in our first years that we came here. Probably, maybe the shelling was a little better then because the water was actually flowing through the pass, so more shells were deposited in there, but you can still find a great number of shells. They're just piled . . . they're in buckets, like somebody just backed a truck up to the beach and dumped shells all over it. It's really amazing. If you've ever been to a beach that has no shells, like if you go to the Atlantic you're on the beach on the Atlantic and you find no shells, well this is just the opposite. They're everywhere. You might want to have shoes on, because if you don't, you'll hurt your feet walking on the shells. Well, so after we finished there, we went to CVS. It used to an Eckerd. Last year it was an Eckerd, this year it's a CVS. So we go in there. We always like to look around. It's a great place to find anything if you've forgotten something. We needed some aloe to cool our burned skin, so we get that. They have pretty much anything you can want in there to fill the gaps if you've left something. We got a battery for our camera. The battery was going dead. I noticed they even have memory cards for cameras if you need an extra memory card and of course anything you'd find at most any CVS drug store, you've got it. So it's a great place to shop if you need to. On our way back to the condo, we pulled in . . . no actually we didn't even pull in to the Dairy Queen. Once again, it was packed and I didn't feel like waiting, so we drove on past and we came home and settled in for the evening. All the rooms here have VCRs and the main living room also has a DVD player, so we sat down in the bedroom and just watched a movie. Susan brought several movies with her. VHS movies and we brought some DVDs, so we can watch those. You can also go to the main office and they'll rent you movies. I believe they're $4 per movie, per night. So, uhm . . . Susan: Oh they charge? Fred: Yeah, they charge. So you can do that if you need that. I think there are a couple of video rental places on the island too, but we've never taken advantage of that. That was it for June 16, 2005, Thursday.
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