Manatees and Fort Myers

Manatees like to stay warm so they will find hot spots in water. Power plant discharge warm water so manatees are frequently found in those areas. Lee County has a park devoted to viewing the manatees around a power plant discharge.

We enjoyed it and saw over 80 manatee in the area (we only saw 5 in the same spot before this). The problem is that there were so many people coming to see them. The parking lot was jammed on a Friday afternoon. It was hard to get space at the fence to see the manatees. We laughed when one of us “it’s a zoo here”. Yes, only manatees and people at this zoo, but a zoo none the less.

It’s a common theme here. It’s really hard to enjoy Florida with all the people. We were planning to visit Sanibel Island, but we heard that the bridge to the island was a traffic jam so we just skipped it. The weather is wonderful but we don’t plan to visit Southern Florida during the winter again.