Three months is a very long time for us to stay put in one spot. Mostly, we have needed a secure mooring, with access to shore and facilities, until I was confident my mother’s care was stable so I would feel more free to travel. I think (hope?) we are at that point now.

Fort Myers Beach will always hold special memories, but this area is changing (as so many places do as they become more crowded). The old small cottages are being bought for the lot, torn down, and large (and tall!) multi-million dollar homes are replacing them. There is an “edge” developing in the Fort Myers Beach area as its population builds. Tourist dollars drive everything. Once lawsuits are resolved, a large Margaritaville Resort will be going up near the Matanzas Bridge, a bridge that can already be backed up for miles on nice beach days. A year ago, good cruising friends witnessed the murder of the director of the library at Fort Myers Beach by a homeless man apparently angered by something the director had previously said to him. A week ago, it was a disagreement between two “camp-aboards” in the anchorage field west of the bridge that left one of them dead. WTF: Welcome To Florida. And then there are the boats with large Trump 2020 flags flying, that regularly circle the mooring field on nice days, making stops in front of the wharf side bars, blaring Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” from their huge speakers. The loudest person wins, right?

In prior years, end of February through mid-March was crazy time: spring break. The beaches are packed with people and traffic is HORRIBLE (you can walk faster than you can drive your car across the Matanzas Bridge). However, perhaps because this has been a warmer than normal winter, it has felt like spring break nearly the entire time we’ve been here. This week, it will only be worse.

The weather this week wasn’t looking great (strong winds, cold toward the end of the week), but we had a window on Monday to get south to Naples and so we took it. Hopefully we won’t regret our decision to move!