Our May Trip: Florida

We've been lucky as all get-out this year. First, we got to stay at my uncle's timeshare on Captiva Island, Florida. Uncle Tom offered his week (at the end of May) to my parents, and they asked Sue and me if we'd like to go with them. They didn't have to ask us twice!

The biggest deal there is the beach. Captiva and Sanibel islands are world famous for the huge numbers of shells that get washed up on their white sand beaches. That Captiva has mainly private homes and resorts means that the beaches are people-quiet and clean. Which is to say, relaxing and beautiful.

There really are gobs of shells on these beaches. This is me, performing the Captiva Island version of the famous "Sanibel stoop." It's hard to walk on the beaches without pausing every so often to stoop down to examine something. Here, I'm rinsing the sand off of some treasure the very first night we got there. (Those are my flip-flops in my pocket, by the way.)

On one of the days, Sue and I took a short day cruise northward to Cabbage Key, where one of the prime things for tourists (like us) to see is the restaurant. The place got famous because it provided Jimmy Buffet the inspiration for his "Cheeseburger in Paradise" song. Naturally, one of us had to get the cheeseburger.

They serve libations there, too. (Oh no I dih-unht!) (Oh yes I did!)

On our previous trips to Captiva, we had not visited the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, which has a natural history museum, several hiking trails, and native plant nursery. Very much worth seeing! I wish we'd gone there sooner. And what a great idea to combine the native plant nursery and sales with the environmental education: as the green world goes, the rest of nature follows.

This (below) is simply a view from along one of the trails.

Here's a view of Pine Island Sound, taken during the aforementioned boat trip.

Manatees are pretty much emblematic of southern Florida, and it seems that whenever one of these "sea cows" lifts its cute little nose out of the water to catch a breath, people gather around and watch. I'm glad that the education about manatee conservation has reached so many people.

Another new part of this trip was visiting the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford Winter Estates in Ft. Myers. The homes and grounds (actually, an arboretum) are well cared for, and the museum and its staff are professional and informative. Here's our docent/tour leader. She did a great job!

There is a statue of Edison under the huge banyan tree that was apparently planted in 1925. It's one of the largest banyans in the United States. Its lower limbs reach out sideways and send down aerial shoots like a mangrove tree. This single tree constitutes its own small "forest."

Here's the statue of Ford, which is located near his winter home. The homes were indeed fun to see, but I have to admit, I got more excited about the many tropical plants all over the grounds!

As with the last time we visited Florida, we made a trip to the Everglades. You know you're getting close when you stop at a rest stop and, when reentering the car, a half dozen mosquitoes fly in with you! This mosquito is squashed against my driver's side window. Well? It wouldn't leave on its own.

Another new place this trip was the Fruit and Spice Park, which is part of the Miami-Dade County parks system. It's in Homestead, Florida, and it's incredibly fun for anyone interested in food, botany, agriculture, or gardening. Yes, bug spray was a good thing, but then, what other botanical garden lets you eat (indeed, encourages you to eat!) the fruits lying on the ground?

I could go on and on about this place, but I'd better hold off. But if you're headed that way, make sure you visit it.

Banana flowers!

Bananas! (Yeah, they sent us away with some; it was late in the day and they were closing up shop: "Here, take these back to your motel with you.") I'm pretty sure this is the variety called "apple bananas," which you can purchase online at Robert Is Here. I had never eaten a banana that tasted so much like a . . . fruit. They were sort of creamy and juicy, but certainly not "overipe." A revelation!

Folks, that Fruit and Spice Park had jackfruit trees, too! You can see the huge, watermelon-sized fruits forming on the trees! They even let you stand under them! (For those of you who are into such things, the jackfruit is in the same family as the mulberry and the Osage orange. The jackfruit is more or less like a big huge edible Osage orange! Another point of interest: Jackfruit is the original flavoring for Juicy Fruit chewing gum!) These jackfruits were forming close to the ground, but others were high in the tree!

This here is a baby pineapple. A variegated or red-tinged one, I think.

. . . And a dragonfruit! Easily the coolest-looking of the tropical fruits down there, because of the nearly florescent magenta pulp color and the nifty green and red outer rind. How does it taste? It's actually pretty mild. The texture (including that of the edible little seeds) is a lot like a kiwi fruit. They're available June through November, and if you keep an eye out for them, your supermarket might get a few in the "nifty gourmet stuff" section of their produce department.

Then, the Everglades. This year, while we traveled, Sue and I read Marjory Stoneman Douglas's Everglades: River of Grass. It's pretty intense, but it really is a great crash course in what the Everglades are all about. Recommended reading for any American. You have to read it! You just have to!

This year we finally drove all the way to the last "stop" on the Everglades National Park scenic road, the Flamingo area, where land and water are no longer clearly defined. We took a guided natural history boat tour there (again, very worthwhile), and saw lots of neat stuff. Here, for example, was one of the baby crocodiles we saw!

Yes, a crocodile! At the very southern tip of the Everglades, there's an overlap in the ranges of the American alligator and the American crocodile! Ain't he cute?

Well, that's all for now. We had two days between the Florida trip and the one to California. Soon, I'll post some pictures from San Francisco!

Robert Is Here: The Frugivore in Paradise

The last full day we were in Florida was the day we woke up in Kendall (a western suburb of Miami—on the highway) and drove through Homestead to Everglades National Park. If you’ve never been to the Everglades, you should make a point of going.




Unlike other major national parks, which mostly seem to center around some kind of spectacular rock formations (mountains or canyons), this one shows you geological flatness. On the road leading into the park, there are signs giving you the elevation: “2 feet”; “3 feet”; “4 feet” . . . However, just a tiny change in elevation means the difference between swamps, prairies (“glades”), pine scrub, and mahogany and mangrove hammocks.




So although it doesn’t offer the mountaineer much to chew on, it is an excellent place to feed your inner biology nerd, to go botanizing, bird-watching, and much more. Including alligator-watching! (And yeah, if you want to see the nifty tree snails, you’ll need sunscreen and bug repellent!)




Apart from the day when all the hydromedusae and comb jellies were in the water near where we were staying at Captiva, this was my favorite day of the whole trip. Yes, because of the wonderful biological diversity of the ’Glades . . . but in particular because of our stop at the nationally known fruit stand called Robert Is Here.




Robert Is Here is a fruit stand located in Homestead, Florida, at a prominent intersection for visitors headed to the Everglades—where westbound FL Route 9336 turns due south onto local road SW 192nd Ave. (There! Now you can find it on Google maps!) It’s surrounded by orchards and crop fields.




There’s a fun story about the name of the stand—it started when its owner was six and sitting at his dad’s produce stand, and not selling anything. Then, a “light bulb” lit up above his dad’s head and he made a sign, “Robert Is Here”; the next day he hung it up next to the sweet little boy. The advertising worked, because people noticed young Robert and bought up his produce. That’s how it got started, back in the early sixties.

This was actually my second time to visit Robert Is Here (and the Everglades). My first visit was in July 1975, when I was nine! On that trip, we saw the liftoff of the Apollo portion of the Apollo-Soyuz spacecraft linkup (remember the handshake in space?). My uncle was living in Florida at that time and invited my family to visit. (By the way, in the picture, that’s him waving from his sweet little Jensen-Healey.)




I have foggy memories of that visit, as they are all mixed up with the rest of my impressions of the entire trip. I do remember that Robert Is Here sold curiosities such as starfruit, mangoes, papayas, and watermelon soda. Even then, the tropical fruit stand seemed as much of a tourist attraction to me as the national park.

Now it’s thirty-five years later, and Robert Is Here has been featured in lots of national media, including my beloved Gourmet Magazine (May 2003), which singled it out as one of the few places in this country to get a decent selection of truly delicious mango varieties.




(Foodie geek: since Gourmet’s demise, and there were no "recent" issues to bring along, I plumbed my back issues for a few magazines to take with me on the plane. The Florida Keys issue, May 2003, was one I brought on this trip. How appropriate!)

Not surprisingly, Robert Is Here has expanded in the last thirty-five years. They offer a luscious selection of seasonal tropical fruits and cool beverages to a curious, hungry, and often overheated tourist crowd.

By the way, there are a ton of fruit stands in the area, many of them apparently owned by Cuban immigrants, and they probably offer lower prices, but I suspect most of them don’t offer the huge extravaganza of products, or the “experience.”




Mangoes are a specialty, but Robert Is Here offers a huge range of tropical specialties—avocados, sapodillas, papayas, key limes, tamarind, water coconuts, and on and on. When we were there, the oranges and most other citrus weren’t in season. But they do sell homemade key lime pies!




And their milkshakes were incredible! There was a big sign for key lime milkshakes, but you could get just about any of their fruits mixed in. Sue and Dad had the key lime shakes, as advertised. The creaminess of the shake made it taste kind of like a key lime pie—a stupefyingly delicious combination of tart and sweet, juicy and creamy. I can’t think about it without my mouth watering.

Mom had a strawberry-key-lime milkshake. I didn’t try that, but you can imagine how yummy that must have been. When it came time to order, I was in a momentary crisis. I wanted to try all of them—they had something like twenty different fruits posted, most of which were curiosities like sapote, dragonfruit, longan, and so forth.




“Jackfruit” caught my eye, so I ordered that.




I’d never tasted jackfruit before. I was drawn to them in the fruit stand because of their tremendous size and unusual bumpy rind. While waiting for our order to be made, I scored a sample of jackfruit as some of the workers were cutting up one for a customer. (They will cut the fruit for you—how nice is that? Not every tourist is adept at dismantling novel fruits, you know.) It tasted like . . . smooth, creamy pineapple, or pineapple without the “bite.” The texture was also like pineapple, but more slippery. Or maybe like a banana crossed with a pineapple.

Botany nerds: Jackfruit is in the Moraceae (mor-AY-cee-ee), the mulberry family. So is our local Osage orange (which is not edible but shows promise as a source of mosquito repellent). The interior of the jackfruit fruit is structurally very similar to that of the Osage orange (if you’ve ever broken one of those in half)—both are “multiple fruits.” Jackfruit has been cultivated in India for perhaps six thousand years.

Anyway, after my little sample, I was confident of my choice! In the milkshake, the jackfruit was mellow, and it added an intriguing flavor that was just . . . “tropical.” Yum!

Sorry that there are no pictures of the actual milkshakes, but it was starting to rain, we’d spent the whole day traipsing around the Everglades, and we still needed to drive clear across the southern part of the state and get to Naples in time to find our motel and get dinner.

And I haven’t even told you about their fabulous selection of honeys. They had samples available of each. There were “flavored” honeys (ginger, key lime, tangerine, cinnamon, etc.) as well as those whose flavor actually comes from the nectar source. Of the latter, I was intrigued by the mangrove honey, as well as the goldenrod, palmetto, avocado, mango, and (of course!) tupelo. (We brought home some mangrove honey.)




And then there are the preserves, jellies, salsas, dressings, and other relishes and sauces. All this stuff, including the fresh fruits (when in season), is available by mail order: www.robertishere.com.

There was more—live music, some lovely parrots to visit out back, vintage trucks in front, and flowers and souvenirs for sale. And yes, Robert himself “was there,” cheerfully helping customers and offering advice alongside his many young employees.

Of course, the biggest attraction for me was the heart of the business: the incredible array of strange new fruits. Such possibilities! I wanted to bring home a sample of each, even a big ol’ jackfruit!

Decisions, decisions. (I’ll let you visit their Web site to see the list and all the pictures.)

What a fun place!