Sanibel and Captiva Islands

Our trip to Key West was supposed to begin on Tuesday.  However, the weather put a hiccup in our plans.   The  forecast didn’t include warm weather and beautiful blue skies.  Instead, the forecast called for  thunder, lightening, strong winds and 100% chance of rain.  Thus, we had no option but to cancel and, of course, cancelling also meant we owed a fairly steep deposit …. one night’s charge.  Ugh.

While in Portland over the holidays we checked out tandem kayaks.   Since Terry no longer has a traveling kayak, we decided to replace it with a tandem.  That would be only one kayak to mess with, only one to load and only one to unload.  Our single Wilderness kayaks remain in Washington and don’t do us much good in Florida. We ended up ordering one from Texas.   To begin with the same kayak was $150 less than what we could find locally,  shipping was free and we paid no sales tax.  The problem was we had to wait for it to ship, arrive and then be delivered. 

Delivery date was supposed to be the 4th but the truck was still in Mobile.  When it finally arrived in Fort Meyers, we decided to pick it up instead of having to wait for it to be delivered.    After all, we were anxious.  Off to the shipping company we went.

This is the shipping package.

  

We were pleased there was no damage.

Next we discovered loading just one kayak is a lot easier than positioning two.

All we had left was trying it out on the river which runs through our RV park.  We didn’t waste any time doing that.

We were happy to report we were pleased with the way it handled and that we didn’t see any alligators while testing it.

Instead of heading to the Keys we headed towards Sanibel Island but it was just a day trip.  Sanibel is known for fabulous shelling and supposed to be one of the best in the USA for collecting seashells.

Florida 2016        

   

Terry and I visited the island about 20 years ago.   There seemed to be a lot more shells then than there are now.  Even though there weren’t as many shells, we did find a few keepers and certainly enjoyed walking in the surf on a beautiful day. 

On top of that we enjoyed watching about 6 dolphins just off the beach. 

After Sanibel we drove on over to Captiva Island.   It’s a beautiful island and very quaint.  It reminded us a bit of the Caribbean with all the beautiful foliage, narrow roads and shops.   Even though Captiva was almost an extension of Sanibel, it was also very different.

  

Even the beaches were different.  Both were beautiful.  We drove to the end of the island and stopped for a walk on the beach.  In this location there was a fairly steep ridge of sand.  It looked like the waves had washed the sand away.

Janice at Captiva    

The waves were crashing and  rolling.  It was beautiful.

‘Tis life on the road.