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These family attractions strike the perfect balance between street smart and nature wise.
Attractions + Learning = Family Fun
Children’s museums, a family dinner theater and historical estate tours keep families entertained – and educated. Take a city walk, or walk on the wild side and listen to manatees sing, pet a snake, and pass around some of the sea’s oddest inhabitants while bonding with your family in the great outdoors.
By Chelle Koster Walton, member of the Society of American Travel Writers
Children’s museums, a family dinner theater and historical estate tours keep families entertained – and educated. Take a city walk, or walk on the wild side and listen to manatees sing, pet a snake, and pass around some of the sea’s oddest inhabitants while bonding with your family in the great outdoors.
By Chelle Koster Walton, member of the Society of American Travel Writers
  Touch tank at Ostego Bay Marine Science Center |
Between the city and the environmental, Aaron gained a balanced first-hand, hands-on wisdom that put him on an even keel for life. Here are some of the lessons and fun facts we learned along the way, both “on the street" and “in the raw."
City Adventures
For urban sophistication in neighborly, kid-favorable settings, we head to Fort Myers and its sister city across the bridge, Cape Coral. As a toddler, Aaron got his first lesson on weather when he walked through a thunderstorm and sat through a hurricane at Imaginarium. And stayed perfectly dry! At Children’s Science Center in Cape Coral, the whisper dishes and electric gizmo that makes your hair stand on end fascinated him on our first trip. By age 8, three years later, he and his buddy, Tracy, were more interested in the optical illusions and puzzles.
 Edison & Ford Winter Estates |
In downtown Fort Myers’ renovated circa-1920 movie theater, Arcade Theater provides a pint-size measure of cultural stimulation and theater savvy with its Saturday Lunch Box Theatre. Broadway Palm Dinner Theater, too, entertains the family with such classics as Hans Brinker and matinee buffets loaded with kid delicacies.
Nature Quests
Decaying mangrove leaves are the baby food of the estuary. The sea robin – a fish with fins, spikes, legs and even wings – looks like some kind of weird animal experiment gone awry. And blue crabs have an internal “pause button" they push when they’re stressed out. These were a few of the lessons Adam, the naturalist aboard Planet Ocean’s eco-tour in Fort Myers Beach, taught us as he handed around an odd assortment of creatures he had pulled from the floor of Estero Bay Aquatic Preserve.
On Sanibel Island, we learned from a Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation (SCCF) guided beach walk that barnacles eat with their toes, gopher tortoises munch at the turtle grass “salad bar" and scallops have 100 eyes.
Other tidbits of information we’ve gleaned on our nature-learning quest across Lee County:
Snakes have smooth, silky – not slimy! – skin. You should always pet a snake in a head-to-tail direction. (Calusa Nature Center & Planetarium)
Stone crab fishermen remove only the claws, which regenerate. A stone crab goes through four sets of claws in a lifetime. (Ostego Bay Marine Science Center)
The 1,500-pound manatee sings soprano! (Manatee Park)
Special Programs & Camps
In addition to drop-by visitor experiences, many attractions deepen their enrichment value with special programs and camps geared toward the family. Lover's Key State Park in Fort Myers Beach, for instance, schedules weekly programs in cast-netting, birding, fishing and beach habitat. Ostego Bay and Arcade Theatre conduct summer camps and kid group programs.
No matter how involved you and your children become, Lee County’s wealth of family attractions strike the perfect balance between street smart and nature wise.
If you go…
Arcade Children’s Theatre, 239-332-4488
Calusa Nature Center & Planetarium, 239-275-3435, www.calusanature.com
Children’s Science Center, 239-997-0012
Edison & Ford Winter Estates, 239-334-7419, www.edison-ford-estate.com
Estero Bay Aquatic Preserve, 239-765-0202, www.ecotrail.com/eb_preserve.htm
Imaginarium Hands-On Museum and Aquarium, 239-321-7420, www.cityftmyers.com/attractions/imaginarium.aspx
Lovers Key State Park, 239-463-4588, www.floridastateparks.org
Manatee Park, 239-694-3537, www.leeparks.org/facility_info.cfm?Project_Num=0088
Ostego Bay Marine Science Center, 239-765-8101, www.ostegobay.com
Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, 239-472-2329, fmbcrc.org/sccf/education.htm
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