I escaped to Ft. Myers, but it couldn’t escape the hurricanes

Hurricane damage near Cape Coral, Florida.
Some folks go somewhere warm this time of year to escape the long Minnesota winter for a while. They do things like sit on a beach, golf, swim or just relax.
We did that escape time last week with a trip to Ft. Myers-Cape Coral area. But we didn’t golf, go to a beach or even attend a Twins spring training game. Our main activity was to visit some old friends.
And the term ‘old friends’ has the dual meaning of them being friends from long ago, and the fact that they, like us, are old.
So many folks we have known over the years are now wintering in the Ft. Myers-Cape Coral area, or are here for a few weeks at least.
Some we have known for 50 years or more. Some we knew 50 years ago and lost track of and now have reconnected with. Some were college friends, and some are other newspaper folks we have become friends with over the years. And there was a group of friends from our days in Tyler, Minnesota.
Our friends we knew back in Enderlin, North Dakota, live on a Cape Coral canal and have a pontoon boat. So, we spent a day out in the Caloosahatchee River and then up and down the coast a-ways.
There is a new color of roof in Cape Coral. It is bright blue. Everywhere you look there are roofs with blue tarps on them as they await their turn to be repaired. There is damage on homes, trees that are damaged or others totally gone. But the damage is not that severe all around Cape Coral.
That is not true along the coast line. Everything along the water has been heavily damaged. The islands of Captiva, Sanibel, Matlacha and Estero (home of Ft. Myers Beach) took the brunt of the hit of Hurricane Ian – the bullseye of its landing.
There have been months of cleanup, and things are getting back to some semblance of normal, but along the actual coast it is a lot slower haul.
On our boat tour with our friends, we pulled in for lunch at a place called St. James City. The name is sort of ironic, as it really is not a city at all, but an unincorporated parish on Matlacha Island, just a bit off of Cape Coral.
St. James City was hit hard. Nearly every building was damaged, many of them suffering major damage. They didn’t get the news coverage of places like Ft. Myers Beach because St. James City really is not a tourist destination, but a fishing village. It was actually started by a religious group back in the 1870s.
The restaurant we were at in St. James was an outdoor dive called The Low-Key Tiki. The back of the building, where the kitchen had been, was destroyed in the hurricane, so they had a make-shift outside kitchen of grills and griddles. The place was literally surrounded by big damaged boats that had been hauled ashore and temporarily stored within feet of our table.
It was an interesting place for lunch, to say the least.
Most of the places our friends are at were slightly damaged – ripped off siding, a broken window, downed trees, and lots of missing canopies on boat lifts.
Even the Stillwater Grille restaurant, in Ft. Myers, owned by our friends Jeff and Julie Meyer, who also own the Pelican Rapids Press newspaper in Minnesota, suffered some damage but survived the hurricane.
On the shoreline, however, things were much, much more severe.
Of course, the damage is one thing. The fact that 109 people were killed by the hurricane in 19 Florida counties is another.
Maybe putting up with a little cold and snow in Minnesota is not so bad.