Sani­bel Island Resorts — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

Sum­mer at Sani­bel Island Resorts

This is one of those Florida scenes that prob­a­bly means more to me than any­one else. It reminds me of being a bare­foot boy going to the beach, scram­bling down a dirt road, or just lis­ten­ing to the breeze rustling the palms. I’m sure every­one has some­thing like com­fort­ing from their own youth. Some­thing you see and it just takes you back to a nice, sim­ple time when you could run around with­out worry — until your mother called to come inside.

My fam­ily spent a lot of our sum­mer vaca­tion time in dif­fer­ent Sani­bel Island Resorts. My par­ents got into the time share craze because of me. I learned that I could get a free 35mm cam­era by vis­it­ing one of those places in Day­tona Beach. My par­ents went along with me, though I’m sure they didn’t want to do it. That’s just one of those sup­port­ive things that par­ents do (not to men­tion a free 35mm cam­era was bet­ter than me bug­ging them to buy me one).

It turns out that the free cam­era was a piece of plas­tic crap, but my father sur­prised me buy actu­ally buy­ing a week at the time­share place. We still have it, too. It’s being used next week. Things really hit their stride when my par­ents bought a time­share at one of the Sani­bel Island Resorts — Tor­tuga Beach Resort. They liked it so much that they bought another week on the back end to just relax. Nei­ther of my par­ents liked to fly and almost all of our vaca­tions were in the state. Oddly enough, they seemed to get over that once I left the house. Hmm.

No mat­ter, these are the sum­mer scenes burned into my mind. I think I’ll go crash a cou­ple of days at the Sani­bel place this sum­mer and spend some time at the Mucky Duck.