Koreshan State Historic Park

 Before we get to the historic site, here are two shots of pelicans and the odd anhinga pole-sitting near sunset at Fort Myers Beach. 

The above were made while on a short beach walk with the Giles family, friends from 'back home' practicing being snow-birds, two weeks at a time.

Yesterday, Jan, Joan and I started out for one of our usual adventures and never reached our planned destination.  Jan will be camping at Fort Myers Beach for a few weeks in February, even though her friends [us] ditched her in favour of the Atlantic coast.  We happened to see the Park sign and decided to suss out the campground to see how the trailer access would be.  It should be an easy spot to get into so much angst was eliminated.

While at the park, we visited the historic side and ended up enjoying the history and buildings.  You can read about the history here. It's a fascinating group of dedicated, hard working, people with strange beliefs, one of which was that we lived on the inside of the world, with everything looking inward.  This model really shows it quite well.

Next is their scientific statement to all this.

One way or another, their failure to survive is best explained by one of the last adherents stating that she lost faith when Americans landed on the moon...

Here's the founder's house.

These bridges were build by park volunteers from old photographs taken by a pro who documented life at the commune.

Parts of the general landscape and planted trees.

And the piece de resistance in my opinion; the work in process of restoring the old workshops, including one of the volunteers.

By the time we'd seen all this, it was well into lunch time so we asked one of the volunteers for a recommendation and the Skip One, a nearby fish house, ended up serving us the best shrimp ever,  even though we had to wait in line for 45 minutes.  Jan had to return to her campground so we never made it to Bonita Springs, our initial destination.  What fun.