Today we made our annual trip to Pine Island for mangoes. Unfortunately, 2014 has turned out to be a poor mango season. There is not a lot of fruit and it is about three weeks late. Nevertheless we still had fun and came home with some yummy fruit: a few mangoes, coconuts, tamarind, and five […]
I love Pine Island. It has no beaches, so development has been slow. But every year I see development gradually swallowing up more and more of the island and it worries me. Now, I have nothing against development, per se. I live in a house. Other people have a right to live in a house […]
We made another run to Pine Island today for mangoes. It’s a tradition I started nearly 20 years ago. A new fruit stand has opened for business in a grove I’ve been driving past for years. Instead of wholesaling their mangoes this year they decided to open a retail stand on their property. Today they […]
Jug Creek Cottages on Pine Island from David McRee on Vimeo. Posted by David McRee at BlogTheBeach.com. A few months ago I was on Pine Island for a couple of days to shoot a video for VISIT FLORIDA about the trip out to Cayo Costa Island State Park and Cabbage Key aboard the Tropic Star. […]
By David McRee at BlogTheBeach.com We drove down to Pine Island today in search of my favorite fruit: ripe mangoes. We hit the jackpot! We also bought 4 pounds of lychees and a couple of medium-sized sapodillas. If you don’t know what those are, I’ll cover them in another blog post in the next week […]
A Quiet Walk Among Calusa Indian Middens and Gumbo Limbo Trees from David McRee on Vimeo. For a long time I’ve been driving past Randell Research Center on Pine Island, FL on my way to other places. When the weather and the moon conspired to ruin my plans for a trip to Cayo Costa, I […]
I awoke Saturday morning with a sense of dread about my trip to Cayo Costa, since the north wind had been howling all night. The weather had forecast NE winds at 9 to 11mph. The marine forecast called for 15 knot N to NE winds. The reality was more like 25 to 30 mph winds. […]
The dock of the Beachhouse Lodge is, so far, my favorite dock in Florida. As you can see, the end of the dock is quite a nice distance from the “real” world. I have to admit that it was pretty chilly for this Florida native, standing on the end of the dock at sunset with […]
This weekend I’m meeting the VISITFLORIDA video crew on Pine Island, and we’re shooting a video of the trip to Cayo Costa Island State Park and Cabbage Key via the Tropic Star passenger ferry. I’m staying at the Beachhouse Lodge, a place I discovered back in 1993. As soon as I arrived this afternoon, I […]
