Santa Maria Resort Hotel Fort Myers

downtown

by doug48

most visitors to fort myers come to see the thomas edison estate and to visit the beautiful beaches in the area. fort myers' downtown historic district is worth a visit. downtown has a nice collection of historic buildings and a number of restaurants and bars.

Edison's Winter Place

by grandmaR

"2005, Feb 17th"

One of the things I wanted to do was visit Edison's winter home. I had thought the hotel had a continental breakfast (some of the websites said that it did), and they had some muffins and coffee in the lobby when we checked in, but the restaurant serves breakfast, so the muffins had disappeared by morning. Bob had some hot tea in the room (using the coffee pot) and I ate a bagel.

We left to get to Edison's house ASAP. The weather guys were reporting fog, and we saw some down by the river. We were one of the first ones in the parking lot.

I thought it would be nice to have a cruise on the replica of Edison's electric boat, so we got a ticket for "The Works" which included the lab, the grounds, the museum, and the Edison house and Ford house in addition to the boat trip. The tickets were $20 each, but I had a coupon out of the local area map for $2 reduction on any adult admission which made them $18 each.

The boat was scheduled for 9:40 and we were to be at the front at 9:30. So first we went through the museum, which had a lot of the old gramophones, old photos, and the story of the reconstruction - we weren't going to be able to go into Edison's house because it was being renovated - both termite and hurricane damage. They gave us a ticket for us to come back when the house was open again - so we have two free adult tickets.

When it came to 9:30, it was still too foggy, so first we went on the house and garden part of the tour and then on the lab tour. They had a special 'crossing guard' to get us across the street from the visitor's center to the houses.

The pool was in much better shape than I remembered - not all full of algae.

Ford's house wasn't on the tour when we went before so that was all new. I took over 80 photos.

We went back across the street and I wanted to check with the tour desk about boat ride times, but Bob persuaded me to go to the lab first.

We got finished with the tour around 11:45, but they said our first chance to go was about 2 pm, so we declined. They refunded that part of the ticket. They couldn't figure out how to pro-rate the $2 off part. So they refunded the whole $5.50 each, making our total $12.50 each.

From here, we left and went north toward Boca Grande and then on toTampa/St. Pete