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If you're looking for smart, savvy travelers to recommend their favorite resort town, you could certainly do worse than two of the smartest and savviest Americans to have ever lived: best friends Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.
When these two men needed a place to get away from it all, they turned to their neighboring winter estates in Fort Myers, where Edison experimented with plants in his botanical research laboratory or swam in one of the state's first in-ground pools. The town was little more than a coastal village in those times, but Edison fell so in love with the place that he lined its streets with 2,000 palm trees shipped in from Cuba, giving the city its current nickname of "The City of Palms".
Nowadays, Fort Myers remains the more laid-back sister of posh Naples, its neighbor to the south. This is a place where family fun takes on record-breaking proportions: The 68,000-square-foot Shell Factory and Nature Park ranks as the world's largest collection of rare seashells, corals, sponges, and fossils at more than 5 million specimens, and features the largest independent gift shop in America. Plus, the city is home to not one but two Major League Baseball teams — the Boston Red Sox and the Minnesota Twins — during their spring training season, as well as the popular minor league Fort Myers Miracle, who play through the summer. And just across the bay, the adjacent town of Fort Myers Beach is the perfect spot for families with kids of any age. Thanks to its shallow waters and lack of undertow, the seven miles of white sand are often called the safest beach in the world.
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If you're a die-hard baseball fan, there's a good chance Fort Myers may already be an old stomping ground — or very close to the top of your to-do list. That's because the city is the spring training home of not one, but two Major League Baseball teams, the Boston Red Sox at JetBlue Park and the Minnesota Twins at Hammond Stadium. Over 275,000 fans fill stadium seats in February and March for preseason Grapefruit League games, making spring training the hottest ticket in town.
With averages of 92 degrees and reliable humidity, summer in Fort Myers can often mean the start of indoor-activity season. But summer also brings peak season for some of the most in-demand local cuisine. At Doc Ford's Rum Bar & Grille on Fisherman's Wharf in Fort Myers Beach, be sure to try two summer favorites: snapper, given a tropical twist with a banana-leaf wrapping, and mango, in the form of the restaurant's storied mango mojito.
Named after the Calusa tribe who once called this region home, the 190-mile-long Great Calusa Blueway follows a centuries-old network of paddling trails off the coast of the Fort Myers area — through estuaries, mangroves, tidal flats, hardwood hammocks, sea grass beds, rookery islands, and deep open water. Rent a kayak or canoe to get up close and personal with dolphins, manatees, and shorebirds, and in early November, stop by for the annual Calusa Blueway Paddling Festival, with races, seminars, and live music.
The mammoth-sized manatee — the average adult weighs up to a whopping 1,200 pounds — is one of Florida's most popular wildlife attractions. During the winter, the endangered giants congregate at Fort Myers' Manatee Park. Built along Florida Power and Light's warm-water discharge canal, the park provides a comfortable winter refuge as the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and nearby rivers drop into the 60s. If you stop by from November through March, you'll have a great shot at spotting manatees from the boardwalks and paths along the shore.