Sights in Fort Myers
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Lakes Park
This innovative and scenic county park encompasses two original creations: the fragrance garden and a miniature train village. The garden was created in 1991 as a place where visually impaired and wheelchair-bound visitors could smell, feel and even eat herbs and flowers. The gardens were built by volunteers from the Master Gardeners Club, Boy and Girl Scouts and at-risk students from a nearby high school.
The miniature train (7.5in gauge) tootles around the 1.25-mile track every 15 minutes. In case you're looking for something else to do, you can rent boats here, too. Lakeside Marina rents canoes for around US$8 per hour. There are alligators in the lake and on the small…
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Edison Ford Winter Estates
- Fort Myers, USA
- Sights › Other
Say ‘American innovation’ and Thomas Edison (lightbulb, phonograph, voice recorder telegraph, etc.) and Henry Ford (mass production, Ford motors) are good contenders for word–image association. Both of these frontier pushers chose Fort Myers as their warm-weather winter-break spot, and their Estates are one of the prime tourism draws in Lee County. Each estate drips with Florida architectural heritage (including one of the state’s first modern swimming pools), while adjacent gardens are a wonderful green escape. A museum extensively catalogues the lives of Edison and Ford, and special events, concerts and educational days spring up throughout the year. Prices and times…
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Fort Myers Historical Museum
This museum is a hit with kids if only to tour the Esperanza, a private Pullman railroad car. Permanent exhibits document the city's history and include Calusa and Seminole artifacts and a display on Colonel Myers - the man for whom the city is named (though he never actually visited his namesake fort). Other exhibits include a Spanish cannon, a complete saber-toothed tiger (Smilodon) skeleton and an early rural pioneer home, or 'cracker' house. There is also an exhibit on Fort Myers' two WWII training bases, which trained British, American, Canadian, Russian and Yugoslavian pilots and gunners.
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Imaginarium Hands on Museum
- Fort Myers, USA
- Sights › Other
This excellent science museum, with over 60 exhibits, is favored by the wide-eyed kid in everyone. Don’t miss the weather-forecasting exhibit, where kids can pretend they are meteorologists and present the weather using monitors. There is also a tornado machine and exhibits on ozone depletion and weather; touching a cloud is pretty neat. A 3-D theater runs shows at 1pm and 3pm. Outside, a ‘dig pit’ lets kids look for fossils and shark teeth, while the lagoon teems with tons of freshwater fish and other Florida aquaculture. Check out the coral-reef tank, aquariums and reptile retreat.
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Bill Hammond Stadium
Forget daylight savings – residents of Fort Myers measure the seasons by the beginning and end of baseball spring training. Minnesota Twins fans literally camp for spring training tickets to Bill Hammond Stadium.
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Art of the Olympians
This unique gallery is dedicated to showing the relationship between art and sport by exhibiting works by Olympic athletes like Al Oerter, Larry Young, Shane Gould and Florence Griffith-Joyner (Flojo!).
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Calusa Nature Center & Planetarium
As kid-friendly as nature gets, there are hands-on exhibits, a planetarium, easy to manage walking trails into three different biomes, and enough wildlife to satisfy the most avid amateur zoologists.
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Manatee Park
Between November and March, this is one of the best spots in the nation to see wild manatees – and all you pay for is parking (per hour $1). There’s a large butterfly garden on-site as well.
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Hickey’s Creek Mitigation Park
Near Caloosahatchee Regional Park, bobcats, water snakes and otters play in over 800 acres of protected forest and freshwater wetlands connected by extensive surface and boardwalk trails.
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Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center
- Fort Myers, USA
- Sights › Art
This historical courthouse has been turned into a magnificent arts space. Even if no shows or exhibits are on, come at night to marvel at the jaw-dropping ‘light sculpture.’
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Southwest Florida Museum of History
Crammed with cool artifacts, this museum leapfrogs from the giant sloths and woolly mammoths of the Pleistocene Era to the twisted props of downed WWII fighter jets in a veritable blink. Along the way, iron cannons and Calusa dugout canoes, a Cracker house and an iron lung provide vivid snapshots of Florida through the ages. If you have kids, get combo tickets with the Imaginarium.
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Terry Park Ball Field
Terry Park Ball Field, used by numerous college teams and dating back to 1925, is one of the most attractive historical ballparks in the nation.
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Imaginarium
A dedicated, hands-on children’s museum and aquarium with enough thrills, chills and animals to wear out the most energetic tyke.
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Butterfly Estates
Even adults will be bowled over when surrounded by hundreds of butterflies and tropical plants in this botanical conservatory.
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Alliance for the Arts
The official arts center in Lee County, the Alliance houses three galleries exhibiting on 325 days out of the year.
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Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve
- Fort Myers, USA
- Sights › Swamp
A 2000-acre woodland and wetland, or slough (pronounced 'slew'), this park is a great, easily accessible place to experience southwest Florida's flora and fauna. A 1.2-mile boardwalk trail is staffed by volunteers who help point out and explain the epiphytes, cypress knees, migrating birds, turtles and nesting alligators you'll find. Wildlife watchers should target the winter dry season, when animals concentrate around smaller ponds. However, the wet summer season is also dramatic: at its peak, the entire slough becomes a forested stream up to 3ft deep. The small nature center has excellent displays; from December to April, free guided walks are 9:30am and 1:30pm daily.
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Imaginarium Hands On Museum
Principally for the 10-and-under set, this above-average interactive play space stands out for its reptile-rich animal lab (including baby gators and a bufo toad), an outdoor pond with gigantic carp and turtles to feed, and 3D movies (included with admission). Along with the more typical hands-on activities, it books first-rate traveling exhibits that make this worthy of an afternoon. It's on the corner of Cranford and Martin Luther King Jr Blvd.
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JetBlue Park
Forget daylight savings – residents of Fort Myers measure the seasons by the beginning and end of baseball spring training. Red Sox fans literally camp for spring training tickets to JetBlue Park.
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