Florida magic beyond the kingdom
Florida offers a lot more than just theme parks. But there’s room for Mickey too
For more than a moment, I found magic in Orlando.
As I stood in the glow of Cinderella’s Castle on a crisp night, fireworks filled the sky and the songs of childhood pealed when Tinker Bell, a human sprite in bright green tights and Day-Glo wings, popped out of a turret and zip-lined toward Tomorrowland like a cartoonish flare.
Thousands of stunned park-goers clapped furiously as the light show dimmed — a perfect end to my first day in Florida with two nephews, a great-niece and Grandma Mary.
I’d promised the kids a trip to celebrate their teen birthdays, and for them — Minnesotans who love to swim and had never seen the ocean — Florida was an obvious choice. But how do you hit the state with children, even those who have edged into their teenage years, and not visit Mickey? We couldn’t. So I booked two days at a Disney resort — and a week on Sanibel, a tiny island in the Gulf of Mexico. For me, Disney was a perfunctory, though thrilling, prequel. I wanted the kids to see what Florida looked like before Walt Disney sprinkled his pixie dust on 30,000 acres of swampland.
But would the kids share my preference for Florida’s real-life vs. Disney world?
I wasn’t so sure when those fireworks tugged at even my heart. I grew more skeptical when we spent the next day at Discovery Cove, a kind of Wisconsin Dells-meets-Club Med where the kids could snorkel in a manmade lagoon without any of the risk of a real reef.
When the kids were young, Grandma Mary made sure they learned to swim, but the underwater world of the Gulf was going to be something different. To prepare, we had taken snorkeling lessons in a Twin Cities swimming pool before our Thanksgiving-morning departure. Our trip to Discovery Cove was meant to further bolster their confidence.
The attraction, run by SeaWorld, is surrounded by hotels and highways, but it was a perfect introduction to the ocean. We snorkeled in the Grand Reef with tame rays and confetti-coloured fish, and floated beneath warm waterfalls and over underwater caves on the Wind-Away river. In a breezy aviary, tropical birds nagged us for treats and landed on shoulders to beg for more.
Midday, our group met with a naturalist and learned about the lives of dolphins. I sat on a manicured shore as the kids and Grandma Mary waded into the water and one by one, had their dolphin experience. They began with mammal-to-mammal kisses before the kids and Grandma Mary took turns holding on tight as a dolphin swam with them across the lagoon.
By 6 p.m. we were on the road to Sanibel Island, which is only a 3 ½-hour drive from Orlando, but seems a million miles away. In moonlight we crossed the 3-mile-long bridge from Fort Myers to Sanibel, a barrier island that’s 12 miles long and 3 miles across at its widest.
Finding our vacation rental wasn’t difficult. The island has only two main roads and not a single stoplight, but also 25 miles of biking and walking paths that wind through a wildlife refuge and lead to hidden beaches and other places cars can’t reach.
Twinkling sand dollars
“This isn’t like Discovery Cove,” my nephew Brayden said the next morning. He was the first to wake and we walked along a boardwalk to the beach, where the tide was still receding, littering the beach with clumps of slimy seaweed and a few rotting fish.
Brayden dipped his toes into the cool, cloudy water, and I imagined him wondering why we’d left Orlando.
Soon, Autumn, Justin and Grandma Mary joined us and we scoured the tidesoaked beach for bone-white sand dollars that twinkled like stars at twilight.
As the morning waned and the sun warmed, the kids ventured farther from that safe place where the sand meets the surf, and it wasn’t long before all three of them were neck-deep in the ocean for the very first time, alternating leaping and diving like the dolphins we hoped we’d see in the wild.
Later, we visited the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum, at the suggestion of my neighbour who spends part of the year on Sanibel.
When I told her I was worried there might not be enough action on the island for our teen travelers, she told me not to worry — there was plenty of action on the beach to keep them entertained.