Steven D. Krause

It’s taken me a couple of days to get around to writing a sort of “Florida wrap-up” post on our trip down to see the in-laws in Naples. We didn’t get home Wednesday until after midnight (our flight wasn’t delayed– we were just on a late flight) and then we spent most of Thursday either recovering from the trip or going up to Brighton to buy an account and start shopping at Costco. That’s its own fine story….

Anyway, more picts and such:

On Tuesday, while Annette and her mother went shopping, Will and his grandpa and I went to Caribbean Gardens/The Naples Zoo. I’m not completely sure I understand all of this, but this place used to be called “Caribbean Gardens” and was until very recently a privately-run zoo. But when the owners of “Caribbean Gardens” decided it was time to cash in– the land is probably worth millions– the city of Naples stepped in and bought it. So even though everything still says Caribbean Gardens, it’s not. If that makes sense.

Anyway, Caribbean Gardens is a modest but pretty nice place to spend a couple of hours. There’s a boat ride known as the “Primate Expedition Cruise” on a small lake dotted with tiny islands which serve as the “cages” for a bunch of different kinds of monkeys. They have a ton of alligators which they feed big hunks of chicken (sadly, those pictures didn’t turn out well), and they also make the most of their other animals by dramatically feeding them, as we see with this tiger:

They also had a great snake show that featured all sorts of cool snakes and lizards and stuff like that. Will had a grand time. Here he is petting a big ol’ boa as we were walking out of the show:

A bit over-priced in my view, but still fun.

Since our flight on Wednesday was quite late, we went up to Fort Myers (where the airport is) and spent a couple hours at the Edison/Ford Winter Retreat. Long LONG story short: Edison had a winter home in Fort Myers since the 1880s and spent between 3 and 6 months a year at the place pretty much his whole life. Henry Ford bought the house next door in 1915, and they spent a fair amount of time together. After these two died, the families gave up the property to the city of Fort Myers and now they have tours.

I posted some information about some of the stuff in the museum part of things– especially different things Edison invented having to do with media technologies– on my official blog, if you’re interested. This is more of the “touristy” stuff here.

Here’s Will and I with a ridiculously large statue of Edison (unless he really was seven and a half feet tall) in front of an enormous banyan tree. The picture doesn’t really do it justice because the tree covers a couple hundred (at least) square yards of space. At first, we were told it was the second biggest banyan tree in the world; then they said it was the biggest banyan tree in the U.S.; then it was the biggest banyan tree in the Continental U.S. (there is a bigger one in Hawaii). I don’t know; it was a big-assed tree.

This is the front of Edison’s House (with Annette’s mom walking by). There wasn’t much in the house actually because they were just finishing up a major restoration. The Edisons had termite problems big-time.

This is the back of Ford’s House; on the left is a garage that had some old cars in it. Ford’s house was pretty much as it was way back when because it was made from a certain kind of Florida pine that was resistent to termites. The woodwork inside this place was really amazing.

Here’s a picture of Edison’s swimming pool. I realize this is a kind of dumb picture, but I decided to include this picture so I could include this one:

Not just “No Trespassing” or “Keep off the pool deck;” the Historic pool deck. Whatever.

Finally, there was Edison’s lab:

This is actually Edison’s second lab on the grounds. The first lab he had here– one where he supposedly perfected the lightbulb– is the one that is now at Greenfield Village in Dearborn. This lab was constructed after World War I as part of a collaboration between Edison, Ford, and Firestone to find a substitute for rubber. When that company went out of business, they pretty much left everything in place, turned off the lights, and locked the door. In other words, this stuff is all pretty much the way it was back in Edison’s day.

At least that’s what the guide said.

On the whole, it was a good trip. It’s always nice to go down there this time of year, where a dip into the 50s is considered frigid.

We’re wrapping up our Naples, Florida trip with the in-laws, and I thought I’d post a few miscellaneous comments/pictures.

The weather has been pretty fine– mid-70s in the day, around 60 or so at night. My father-in-law turned on the heat and was concerned if we were warm enough at night. It’s in the low 20s in Ypsilanti right now; yeah, I think we’re warm enough.

We made a number of short trips to the beach in Naples– I think three times. All two or three times, we went to this beach that involves a “shuttle” ride on a big golf court sort of rig down a boardwalk and through the mangroves to the beach. I don’t have any pictures to share of this here, but it was an amusing part of the beach voyage.

Here’s me and Will waving with glee in the sun.

Here’s Annette after a bird pooped on her. No kidding. We were sitting there, minding our own business, when some seagull or something like that pooped on her. It was both upsetting and amusing.

Here’s Annette, the day after the bird pooping incident, contemplating the universe. Actually, she’s watching Will who is playing in the surf.

Anyway, I find the beach fun. Because of mis-applied sunscreen, I always end up with weird burns (my left forearm is burned badly because I forgot about it). I like to walk on the beach for reasons that are both about contemplating the world and people-watching. It’s a nice place to do some light reading, WIRED magazine in my case.

We went one night to catch part of the sunset on the Naples pier… a long story, that evening, but it turned out okay.

More later; now it’s time to eat.

Annette and I had a lovely day while Will and the grandparents went off on an all-day trek to Everglades National Park. After lounging about the house, we went off to the Naples National Art Festival, which is nowhere near as big or zoo-like as the Ann Arbor Art Fairs but was very pleasant. Actually, we talked to one artist who said that she had been going up to Ann Arbor for Art Fair for years and years but she wasn’t going this year because they are simply charging too much money for exhibitors and they aren’t selling enough stuff. Could make for an interesting summer. In any event, I bought a T-shirt but no other art.

Then, after a bargain happy hour, we went on to the main event, which was a sunset cruise on the Naples Princess. This was Annette’s parent’s idea (and their present to us!) and not the sort of thing we normally would have done, but it was fun and kind of interesting.

The basic premise, as we understood it, was we went out for a while on this large boat, ate and drank, listened to Dixieland jazz (of all things….), and watched the sunset. Here’s Annette in anticipation.

Well, the weather was kind of bad, so while we did get to see a sunset of sorts, it was pretty cloudy. And beyond that, it was too choppy for them to take us out into the gulf, so it was all puttering around in the canals.

Which brings me to the unexpected element of the tour. Annette’s mother had said to me before we left “Wait until you see some of these houses,” and she wasn’t kidding. Up and down these canals were these gigantic and ridiculously over-the-top houses. I could have taken 100 pictures like this, but besides the dubious qualities of my camera and my less than great photographic abilities, the houses all pretty much looked alike after a while. They were positively pornographic in the way that the food on the food network or gardens (or houses) on HGTV are like porn, softly-focused images of exaggerated and impossible to actually achieve expressions of ecstatic perfection. These houses practically throbbed in their freakish abilities to perform.

What’s interesting is that these houses are apparently not the “really big ones;” according to Annette’s parents, the most spectacular houses are the ones that are on the gulf.

It was a kind of weird spectacle. In part because of the less than ideal weather, the house porn became the main attraction. Some of our fellow passengers were offended; we overheard more than one conversation where someone was “disgusted” with the display of wealth and the fact that no one needed that much money. Some of our fellow passengers were enraptured; more than once we heard gasps or child-like excitement at the infinite horizon pool next to the elaborate patio kitchen. Most though were a mix of the two, like Annette and I. I find myself, like more traditional porn I suppose, simultaneously repulsed and attracted.

On the way back, it was darker, which made it easier to look into the houses. Just to add to the extravagance of it all, most of these houses are vacation homes and actually empty most of the year. But like we were riding some sort of boat ride through a zoo, we did manage to spy into the animal cages, looking for signs of life, and what we saw was some of the extremely wealthy in their natural habitat. The ultra-rich, it turns out, do not have wild sex orgies out by the dock or offer human sacrafices in their patio pizza ovens. Rather, they sit around inside and eat dinner and watch TV. Fascinating.