Marco Island FL

Corey: May 2-10
Jen: May 7-10

The weeks proceeding this trip saw a flurry of text messages reading "Maaaaarcooooo!" quickly returned was the reply of "Iiiiisland!"
Jen's sister and brother-in-law, Amy and Brian, are on a tour around the country (www.kuzmerlain.blogspot.com) and decided to take a week in Marco Island Fl. Corey went down to join them on Saturday along with their friend John from GA. Jen, because of work, flew down for a short vacation or a long weekend, however you want to look at it, on Thursday. Marco Island is nice if you are looking for a slower paced beach vacation. It was also the low season, which suits us just fine. We stayed in a suite at the Olde Marco Island Inn and Suites- decent.


Most of the week was spent at the beach and exploring Marco Island. We all decided we want to buy a condo at the Esplanade Shops. This has shops, restaurants, including a Cold Stone Creamery and beautiful views of the bay. Thursday night after a glorious day at the beach, we celebrated Big John's birthday (which was actually Friday) by hitting the town. After consulting with the front desk at the Inn, we took a cab over to the Tokyo Inn, a Japanese Steakhouse. It wasn't much to look at but the food was tasty, and our chef Tim put on a good show. We then took the craziest cab ride of our lives, and funniest, to the bar the locals had been telling us to visit all week, the Snook . Which was also walking distance to the Inn. Um, they have happy hour from 10 pm - 1 am! It was a good night and Brian got the whole bar to sing happy birthday to John at midnight.



Friday started with a nice greasy breakfast sandwich from Starbucks, not as good as Dunkin'. We then headed down to Everglade City to get a fan boat tour of the Everglades. After doing come web searches we decided to go to Totch's Island Boat Tours. Our boat Captain Javier did not disappoint. We started the tour and were immediately joined by a young pelican. Clearly this was a rehearsed trick with the pelican but it was still eyeing Amy in a freakish way. We saw some interesting trees, foliage and quite a bit of wild life, including rather tame raccoons who come up to the boats for dog biscuits. After getting to hold a very strong and very smelly three year old alligator we headed back to Marco to go to the beach one last time.



For our last night on the island, we watched an amazing sunset (exactly at 8:02 pm as predicted by the weather service) on the beach with probably everyone else in town. There was applause and cheers when the sun dropped below the horizon. We looked but didn't see the green flash. (It's a real occurrence by the way). We had a lovely water side dinner at CJ's on the Bay and finished the evening with a stop at Cold Stone Creamery. Or as we often call it, Stone Cold Creamery- WWE reference anyone?..no? moving on.

Departing early Saturday morning (too early for Jen) we headed up to Fort Myers (we were flying back to NH from there the next day). Amy, Brian and John dropped the Kuzliots off at a hotel in the middle of a shopping plaza and headed back up to Georgia. Jen and Corey hiked up across the hot pavement to an Ihop for a huge and yummy breakfast/ lunch and then spent a lazy day by the hotel pool. Conveniently, the shopping complex had the Bell Tower 20 Cinema right next door; we went to see Wolverine- it was ok, should have seen Star Trek instead. After we ate dinner on the outside deck at Shoeless Joe's, the hotel restaurant and bar (Fort Myers is the spring training home of the Red Sox and the Twins), we attempted to walk to the river but it was dark, a non-residential area and a lot further walk from the hotel than it looked like on the map. Oh well, maybe next time. It was a fun vacation, see the pictures in the post below.