The view from our deck
Lloyd Alter
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Some might question whether a series on frugal green living can include a trip to Florida; there is a bit of a contradiction. But I have a 91 year old mom, in relatively good health, who needed a break from the long Canadian winter and has the money to pay for it, and to invite her kids along. We started two years ago with a condo in Hallendale, a boring, horrible place between Fort Lauderdale and Miami where we spent our vacation in a car (see it in treehugger here). Last year, I insisted on trendy South Beach and it was worse.
So this year I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make it green, relaxing and (relatively) cheap. After the "excitement" of South Beach I wanted a quiet, relaxing spot and all I cared about was that it had high speed internet because this was not my vacation, this was for my mom, and I was going to be working the whole time. I had heard about Sanibel Island and focused on it.
To be perfectly honest, I have always hated Florida, and would rather spend my winter on my snowboard. My wife and kids don't like it either, and stayed home. I felt like I spent the last two trips there in the car driving between restaurants and wanted a different experience.
Last year I used Craigslist and got in the middle of a scam where I rented a foreclosed unit; I even got served with papers as a tenant in possession, I was never doing that again. I was looking for an old fashioned place where my mom could have a short walk to the pool or the beach, preferably without an elevator. I stumbled onto an old cottage resort that appeared to have new owners, and entered into discussions with them, nervous about my previous experiences but determined to find something special.
Called Mitchell's Sandcastles, it looked good but I had no idea if it was a dump or not. After last year's foreclosure fiasco, I corresponded extensively, spoke on the phone a number of times, asked for photographs and probably drove the owners, Joel and Kim, crazy. But everything they said about their work restoring it turned out to be true; it had the charm of the old, but the things that mattered were clean and new. This is important; we can't just keep tearing everything down and replacing it with air conditioned highrises.
Our unit was so much like my Mom's old cottage on Ontario's Lake Simcoe that she felt at home in seconds. It had a full kitchen, so every day, my sister and I would bicycle into town (free with rental) to buy what we needed from the local general store. We did not use half a tank of gas on the rental car in ten days; Sanibel is a cyclist's paradise and I never set foot off the island. People of all ages are on all kinds of bikes, and everyone says hello. The people in cars are so intimidated by the number of bikes that they barely move.
We at Planet Green tend to agree with George Monbiot, that Flying is Dying. We know that plane travel has a huge carbon footprint. But really, if you can travel to a spot where you can spend your time cooking your own food, bicycling everywhere, then perhaps even a trip to Florida can be green.
