28 March 2013
Bob
Puffin departed Ft. Meyers yesterday to begin the cruise back across the Okeechobee and on up to Solomons, Maryland. But the crew certainly didn't leave empty-handed. Three great months on Florida's west coast has left us with a ditty-bag full of great memories, some fine new friendships and a chance to see some old friends as well.
Cruising earlier, we found Sarasota and Saint Petersburg packed with stuff to see and do but a month spent in Ft. Meyers convinced us that the City of Palms does not suffer by comparison. Each month there's both an Art Walk and a Music Walk with a dozen or more bands all playing outside in various downtown locations. Another night was "bike night" with more bands (pictured above). Yet another evening featured beautifully renovated old Ford cars, there to celebrate the opening of a new restaurant, naturally enough, called the "Ford Garage". It's all tricked out, top to bottom, with old-timey Ford memorabilia while the menu features hamburgers of all persuasions. It seemed almost any given night something was going on downtown.
Daughter Sara and her husband Wayne visited us there for several days mid-March during a particularly eventful weekend - I'm sayin' the downtown was smokin'. Nancy and I even danced in the street to the sweet sounds from a great Elvis impersonator and his band. (Perhaps secretly, Nancy and I hoped all this activity might dispel any notion that Sara might think her parents were another pair of semi-comatose geezers gone to Florida to snore away their golden years in a sun-baked stupor.)
We topped it off the last day of their visit with a short cruise up the Caloosahatchee River. Sara had mentioned earlier she wanted to see a manatee and luck of all luck, we were treated to an extraordinary display of disporting manatees presumably in search of connubial bliss. That's the only explanation for the boisterous behavior of a species whose lifestyle is otherwise both solitary and sedentary in the extreme.
Unfortunately, a picture of Sara photographing this event is my only documentation of this remarkable "affair", absorbed as we were in watching this event from a respectful distance.