Sanibel Island

Last weekend, Caleb and I finally made it to Sanibel Island. Rob and Myah had some 'Daddy/Daughter' time at home because he couldn't get away from work for both days.

Sanibel Island sits just off the west coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. Because of how the island is angled, it is has tons of beautiful shells wash up onto it's beaches. In fact it's considered one of the top five shelling beaches in the world. We got there on Friday afternoon and headed out to the beaches so we could explore before low-tide (best time to look for shells). We found some nice shells, but nothing spectacular. There were other people out looking too, so finding the nice ones was rare. The rough surf, jellyfish and signs warning of recent shark sitings also kept us out of the water. We did have a lizard ride on our car while we drove and a crane that followed us along the beach, so that was interesting.

I love these pictures of Caleb on the beach at sunset

Our stowaway lizard and our stalking crane

The next morning we woke up at 5:30am so we could be out on the island before low tide at 7am. The only catch was that it was pitch black (no street lights on the island) and there were severe thunderstorms. We had a little breakfast and then hung out in a parking lot waiting for the storms to take a break and the sun to come up. We finally managed to get on the beach at 8am and were just about the only people out - the weather was still a little rainy and the storms were hovering close by. Lucky for us, the overnight storms had stirred up some shells and washed them up on the beach. We found a lot of nice shells including several conchs that were in good shape. We probably could have found a lot more but the surf was too rough to go in and the thunderstorms came back after a hour and a half. After Caleb declared that he was 'too young to die by lightning' we decided to call it a (very early) day. We ended up at a seashell store and they had large bags of shells for $8 so I let Caleb pick one out for a souvenir. I had to laugh because it was cheaper to buy a bag of shells than it was to pay for the parking and hunt for them on the beach!

Caleb was thrilled to find this big conch on the beach, even if it was pretty beat up.

Caleb examines each of the shells that were in his bag.

These are the shells we found - we separated the nicer ones (on the left) from the ones that were chipped or cracked (on the right)