A vacation in Florida in the winter? How trite can you get? Everybody goes to Florida in the winter. Even the geese go to Florida, flying the route with JetBlue and Delta. The very thought of joining the migration was a turn-off. Better by far, we always thought, was spending the winter rounding Cape Horn, transiting the Panama Canal, cruising French Polynesia.
But we had done those things. Now, we decided, it was time to do the unthinkable. So this year we went to Florida for most of January – and we loved every minute of it! We found all the warmth and the sunshine the travel folders promise, interesting flora and fauna, lots of good restaurants, and nice people who will leave you to yourself if that is your preference.
What did we do in Florida? As little as possible, frankly. We sat by the beach, mostly, in 80-degree weather. I read three books, Jill two. We dined out most evenings. We toured a wildlife preserve, visited a shell museum, saw a play, watched a movie. It was, all in all, a blissfully restful vacation in a beautifully serene setting.
The condominium we rented was on Sanibel, an island joined to the rest of Florida by a long causeway. Sanibel is best defined by what it lacks. It has no high rises, the building height limit being the height of the tallest palm tree. It has no traffic lights. Instead, it has four-way-stop intersections, where the drivers are so courteous that four cars may wait all day for someone to make the first move. In fact, as I eventually figured out, each of the approaching drivers is expected to make a mental note of where he or she is in the queue, and you will rarely see two cars in a row enter an intersection from the same direction, while others wait. (If you do, odds are that the second driver is a tourist from Massachusetts.) There are also no parking meters and no big-box stores.
The beach at Sanibel is, I must admit, almost as nice as ours here in Maine. The sand looks and feels just like ours, although the two beaches have quite different geological origins. The beach at Sanibel has many more varieties of seashells than we do, and on more than one occasion I was indeed the literary beachcomber I claim to be. Joining us on the long strand at Sanibel were pelicans (brown and white), egrets, terns, cormorants, herons, and other sea birds. Away from the beach, the hibiscus and the bougainvillea were the showiest of the many colorful flowers along the sides of the roads.
Sanibel is 12 miles long, and at its far end a thread of land connects it to Captiva, another barrier island. There are more resort islands after Captiva, but they are accessible only by sea or air.
So we must revise our opinions and bury our prejudices. Those who spend their winters in Florida are not crazy. (Some will tell you that the crazies are those who stay in Maine, and they may have a point.) You don’t have to play golf to enjoy Florida. You can find places where life is slow-paced, where you can avoid noise and glitz. It’s not the Florida you see on Miami Vice or CSI Miami. (Come to think of it, Miami is giving Florida a bad name.) The people you meet in Florida are just as agreeable as the people you meet in New England, because, face it, they are the same people.
Sanibel is a treasure of a place to live or to vacation, mostly because the residents have successfully resisted pressures to overdevelop their island. But in Florida those pressures are powerful and unremitting. Now under construction is a new, wider, higher, faster bridge linking the island to Fort Myers. Will the new bridge overwhelm little Sanibel? Will more traffic mean traffic lights and parking meters? Will Sanibel’s two-lane main street (Periwinkle Way, if you can believe it) be widened? Will the merchants demand larger parking lots? Will tour buses from Fort Myers clog the island’s streets? I hope the good people of Sanibel are smart enough and tough enough to keep the barbarians from their gates, but it probably won’t be easy.
