Three Days in Florida

Cold, snow, slush, shoveling, scraping, slogging, too many layers, the list goes on–winter has been a drag!…especially if you live above the 40th parallel! 

So, every winter we say to ourselves “lets get out of here for a winter vacation” and this year we actually did it!  

We now have several friends who have retired and are in the mode of  “getting out of here” in the winter. Lucky us! We now have several destinations in Florida where we can visit, warm up and dream about shedding our winter clothing layers full time. Three months at a time may be just a fantasy for for now (for various reasons) but someday I’m sure we’ll make it happen!

For now, our visit to Florida will take us to three locations. One on the east coast and two on the gulf side. We definitely love both sides but there are advantages to either location that I’ll get into as we go along.  

Living in the midwest and flying out of a regional airport, we need to pretty much allow a full day to get to Florida–unless something goes awry which can always happen when traveling in the winter.  

So, for clarification, the three days covered in this post skip the travel days (for the most part). We fly into and out of Fort Myers International Airport (RHS) so our itinerary is designed to limit the time on “exit” day to a short drive to the airport on the morning we fly home.  Luckily, our last stop is in the Fort Myers area and it is close to the airport. 

After arriving in Fort Myers, we load up our (way too large but very comfortable) SUV (rented through Costco, by the way, saving around $100 on the week’s rate) and head east across the state.  Florida is pretty skinny in the east/west direction and it only takes around 3 hours to make the trip to West Palm Beach from RHS airport which sits along the gulf side of the state.  The drive is pretty easy (light traffic and flat) so we’re able to rubber neck along the way to see the green, lush Florida landscape.  LOTS of green…which is a site for soar eyes that are conditioned to a lot of white-out glare from snow.

So, here we go…