Cicerone

TeacherD, in response to your original question, I was on Sanibel at Thanksgiving. My parents live in Ft Myers and have a time share at Tortuga, so we went over to Tortuga to take a look. They are still closed, as you may already know, and estimate opening in February. They appear to have lost few if any trees, and the pool, pool house, tennis courts and outside of all the units look fine, very little or no damage at all. The walkways to the beach were closed and we could see that a few boards were missing on parts of the walkways. I climbed the outside stairs and looked in from the screened porch of one of the units in Building A (closest to the beach), and could see that all the carpets had been ripped up and new carpeting was there in a roll but not yet down. I believe they have already repaired all the roof damage and are ready to do the inside work. If all the carpets etc in all the units have to be put down, I would be a bit worried about a February opening as there are a lot of units and they will lose time over Christmas, but you might keep checking. As I have said, the pool, landscaping all looked fine so if they can get all the interior work done by Feb, then you will have no problem and can use all the facilities and the beach.

It seemed that all the shopping areas were open, and many if not most restaurants on Sanibel were open, and most of them on Captiva as well. South Seas is still closed, and I think most of Sundial is closed as well.

Some places like the beach at the end of Algiers lost all their trees. Ding Darling was much in much better than I expected.

Captiva was really quite unbelievable, there are basically no trees left over about 5 feet tall.