jducoeur

[Actually yesterday's post. Dad is the IT department for the Pointe Santo complex, and was rather chagrined to discover last night that most of us were unable to connect to the Internet. He got to spend the morning tracking that down to a problem between the DHCP router and the new complex-wide industrial-grade Wifi setup. But with those mundanities out of the way, and the all-important connectivity restored, on to my usual impressionistic posting about my vacation...]

I'm standing on dry(ish) ground: sand that is just damp. Suddenly, we're up to our knees in water, and the cold splash comes all the way up to our shoulders. We jump a bit. The roar of the breaker is quickly replaced by the carbonated hiss of the receding waters, full of popping bubbles.

Shelling on Sanibel isn't like other places. Huge iridescent dark shells as big as my outstretched hand litter the shore at the high tide mark, so common that one little boy has built his sandcastle mostly out of the ones nearby. We dicuss what they might, inconclusively, along with wondering about the papery tubes littered all over. Big clam shells are so common that you could outfit the Carolingian Cooks Guild with flour scoops just from the ones found along a few feet of shoreline.

Birds abound, looking for their meal among the bivalves. A posse of little terns huddle and strategize just above the tide line. As the wave washes out, they walk along with it; as the next one splashes in, they run back up to the safety of the seaweed. A pelican floats lazily, a couple dozen feet out, unperturbed by the way he is rising and falling four feet every few seconds.

One realizes that Sanibel is shells, an eight-mile-long sandbar of them, and nothing more. Every few dozen yards, we encounter a stretch of shore that is made of nothing but small shells -- I can reach down, scoop up a handful, and come away with half a dozen small but elegant perfect shells that would be a prize on most beaches, but which aren't even worth the dime a dozen here. A bit further on and it is entirely made of fragments and shards a millimeter in size, not really shells any more but not quite willing yet to surrender to sandy senescence...

To begin with, you have to understand that Sanibel is flat. No, flatter than that. msmemory and I have a default eight-mile route that we tend to bike each day; the hilly part of that is going over a bridge with an elevation of, oh, about three feet. And the traffic on the roads can be miserable, especially in the late afternoon. So it should not be surprising that those in the know get around by bicycle. There are two main rental companies, Finnimore's and Billy's.

Now Billy is a clever and observant guy, and I gather that, a year or two ago, he noticed his demographic. Broadly speaking, the renters are fairly well-off, and while there are some kids, they're not the rule. So he went and spent a fair bundle of money, bought a small fleet of HTs, and created Segway of Sanibel. Four tours of the island daily, up to ten people per tour, conducted entirely on Segways.

The toy lives up to its billing. We started out with about a five-minute lesson on how to mount and dismount, move forward and back, and turn. And then we were off, zipping (rather slowly) around the bike paths. Within half an hour, the thing became completely second-nature -- rather like riding a bike, it works best if you don't really think about it much.

The Segway turns out to have three "gears". We started out with the black "beginner" key, which limits your speed to about 6 MPH -- a sort of moderate jogging speed. Once the tour guide was confident that we had a clue, he advanced us to the yellow "intermediate" key, which boosts the speed to a more respectable 8 MPH and improves the turning response. We never got to use the red "advanced" key ourselves (island policy apparently doesn't permit the full 12 MPH speed on the bike paths), but at the end of the tour he let us try out his machine at full speed in the parking lot. That is a *lot* of fun. In the lower keys, the machine sort of fights back when you try to go fast: you lean forward, and it leans you back to slow down. With the red key, it just keeps accelerating to what feels like the natural speed of the device.

The tour itself was a pleasant wander around the central district of the island. The highlight was a stop by the informal Aviary. Apparently, the island is prone to twits who buy parrots and other exotic birds, utterly failing to understand that (a) they require a fair amount of work to treat properly and (b) they live for a *long* time. So stray parrots turn up from time to time, and this family takes them in and cares for them. They also had a few other exotic animals -- a couple of ring-tailed lemurs and the like.
( Pictures below the cut )