We stayed at Pioneer Village RV Resort in Fort Myers for a whole week, since they had a seven day minimum stay around the holidays.
On Christmas Eve, we turned on the Christmas music and drove to Edison and Ford Winter Estates to see their Christmas Decorations. A lot of other people had the same idea, but we eventually found a parking space. It was in the 40s, so we wore our winter coats, hats and gloves while walking around. There was one area that had lit spiral trees lining the sidewalk with homemade decorations by various school classes. I was impressed by some of the decorations, many made out of plastic water bottles, cups and lids. We also saw the gardens, old cars and the old houses that Edison and Ford used to live in on the Estate. There were several huge, super cool Banyan Trees (used to make rubber) on the property. I’m not sure if it really ended up being worth $20 / person for the hour we walked around, but I was glad to have done something Christmas’y to help put us in the Christmas Spirit.
We stopped by the grocery store on the way home to pick up cookie dough and orange rolls to have as a treat on Christmas day. (We decided to spend our gift money on Disney and National Park experiences this year, so we had to do something to make the day special! haha) We did, however, surprise Marissa with a small gag gift, since she really likes any Ryan Reynolds movies. (We also watched a bunch of Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place episodes while she was with us!) Instead of trying to cook a turkey in the RV, we went out to eat on Christmas day. We went to the Ginger Bistro, where Randy was joking about reenacting the Chinese Restaurant scene from A Christmas Story. (Neither the song nor the duck actually happened, but we did see the ducks with heads hanging up at the restaurant.) Next door to the restaurant was a place called HotBins that I was curious about, so we went in to see large tables full of miscellaneous packages. It looked like a collection of Amazon returns and lost packages that couldn’t be resold. The price of everything was the same each day, from $3-$12 depending on the day of the week. There were plenty of bargains to be had for those willing to dig around long enough to find them. It was an interesting place and we had fun searching for cooky stuff, but we didn’t end up buying anything.
The next day, we ate lunch at Tony’s Pizzeria then took Marissa to the airport to fly back to St. Louis, but got a call from her an hour later saying the flight was canceled. They said they had issues getting a crew, given all the messed up flights from weather in other parts of the country. She eventually got another flight out for the next day and found her suitcase (she said she had PTSD as she looked around for it), while Randy drove back to pick her up. Shortly after she got back, she got an email saying her new flight was canceled. 🙁 She had trouble getting an agent on the phone (busy signal and getting disconnected instead of getting put on hold) and eventually fell asleep. Her phone said she was on hold for 6 hours, but we don’t know if it disconnected or if she didn’t hear someone answer. We noticed Southwest didn’t have any available flights to St. Louis until Saturday, but we were going to leave Fort Myers on Friday. So, we went ahead and booked a flight out of Jacksonville, FL on Saturday for her, in case we couldn’t get an agent to help us before that flight was sold out. So, we get to hang out with Marissa an extra few days! And we’re hoping the Saturday flight doesn’t get canceled, otherwise getting her on another flight in another airport will get more complicated as we travel back to VA. (Southwest says they can’t book her on a different airline, and it’ll cost $800-1000, so we don’t really want to do that ourselves)
We also had a problem extending the office slide out while staying here. Unfortunately, it had extended a couple of inches before getting stuck, and then would not go back in; so we needed to figure out the issue in order to retract it before moving on Friday. In the process of troubleshooting, I was pushing a little reset button in the controller and a large spider started crawling out. Yikes! It ran back in before I could smush it, then wouldn’t come back out, so Randy unscrewed the controller cover. The plan was to slowly lower it with the spider on it, but when he tried to pull it down, it was stuck on one end by a super heavy-duty spider web. Yuck! The spider dropped down and I trapped it in a rag, then Randy shook it out onto the concrete and smushed it. Eww! Unfortunately, the spider was in the bedroom slide out’s controller so cleaning that up didn’t actually fix our issue.
The error code on the office’s controller said we had a short to ground, which meant there was probably some bare wire somewhere shorting out, which meant it was beyond anything we wanted to deal with ourselves. So, Randy called a bunch of mobile tech guys and fortunately found one who had a cancellation and could squeeze us in the next day. The tech had to pull off molding to get to the motors and drop a section of the underbelly in order to replace the old/damaged wires, so it was definitely a job for a professional! I’m super thankful we found someone who was able to fix the issue!
On our last full day in Fort Myers, we met Randy’s old college friend and her family for breakfast at Skillets in Naples, FL. It was fun catching up with them, plus the food was yummy! We tried to book a tour boat to see Manatee, but there were only two spots left. So instead, we took the long way back to the RV, along the coast, and checked out some of the devastation still left from Hurricane Ian. Even though we could tell a ton of work had already been done in cleaning and rebuilding, there is still a ton left to do. So sad.
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