Thank you Frontier Airlines for making quick weekend trips to Fort Myers, Florida, affordable and convenient! It was just what we needed to fill our Vitamin D tanks on Martin Luther King weekend!
As you know, Fort Myers was hit badly by Hurricane Ian a few months ago. While there is still a lot of rebuilding and clean up to take place on the nearby beaches, a weekend spent exclusively downtown still offers a enjoyable and interesting visit for all!
While we stayed with friends, we visited the Luminary Hotel downtown. It is new and fresh, and within walking distance to various restaurants downtown. It has a great rooftop pool, and an outdoor bar and sitting area overlooking the river and harbor. It was cooler weather on the day we visited, but could see it being a fun place to hang out on a nice warm day!
Within walking distance of the Liminary is a brand new playground! It is beautiful and has lots of variety in climbing equipment and slides. Our children, 5 and 7, really enjoyed it! One day we packed lunch to the playground from Mason's Famous Lobster House. It was delicious! There were lots of other tasty looking restaurants downtown... including Belgium Yummies where we stopped for ice cream and crepes!
As an afternoon/evening activity, we visited the Fort Myers location of PopStroke. This is a restaurant, bar, and playground built around 2 18 hole golf courses designed by Tiger Woods, and inspired by the putting he did with his "Pop". It was wonderfully designed, but extremely busy so we did not golf. Fortunately, we found a great table by the playground so our kids could play and we could enjoy drinks, the football game, and watching the putters! Fort Myers is one of only five locations so far, with three to open in 2023.
Finally, prior to flying home, we had a great visit to the Edison Ford estates. Thomas Edison was the first of the two to summer here and performed studies in a huge botany laboratory trying to discover a domestic way to produce rubber. Ford, enjoying his visit with Edison, and his quest for cheaper rubber, built an estate next door. The grounds are beautiful and the homes are staged as they were used by their initial families. After a wonderful visit, there is a very cute coffee shop onsite with yummy deserts!
You will notice that this visit does not include a beach. That's right -- for a weekend visit to Fort Myers, especially in the winter, I don't think the beach is necessary! And given Hurricane Ian recovery, most beaches are closed. The "www.visitfortmyers.com" website as of the date of this post states as follows: Most public beaches located throughout the Islands, beaches and neighborhoods of Fort Myers (Lee County) are currently closed. Last Updated: 2/14/2023
Beach access is limited to Gasparilla Island State Park (Boca Grande), as well as Blind Pass Beach Park and the Tarpon Bay Road Beach access area on Sanibel Island.
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