a Chatelaine breakfast

an omlette of smoked salmon and cream cheese, hidden inside light, fluffy eggs and fresh baguette--perfect

Chihuly glass

belly

on terra firma con mare

not just breakfast, Lighthouse Cafe breakfast

The first morning in Sanibel we went to the Lighthouse Cafe, by tradition and be-
cause of the 364 day antici-
pation.

My father, the early riser among us, started going to the Lighthouse for breakfast well before the rest of us.

Due to his unfortunate insistance one year to go to a much coveted restaurant, memorable only for its horridness, my father's recommendations were taken with only a polite acknowledgement, so it was some time before the rest of us succombed to his insistance of the Lighthouse's deliciousness. We were skeptical, basically.

However, his reputation was well restored by the best breakfast pretty much anywhere.

The setting doesn't hurt. The restaurant is smallish, with odd little rooms, heavy wooden tables and chairs that are well worn, fans only (no A/C blast), and mishmashed framed photos of lighthouses adorning the walls in mass. It's a laid-back, busy, coastal, festive place where people often wear bathing suits to dine in.

The photo features their granola pancakes with bananas and real maple syrup. You can barely make out the bowl of fresh blueberries to the left. There's orange juice, but not JUST orange juice; they serve Sun Harvest fresh-squeezed orange juice which happens to have its factory located nearby on Fort Myers. Fresh doesn't do it justice. And you can make out the large strips of bacon at the back of the plate. Coffee is a requirement. It's breakfast. We're American. Coffee it is!

What you don't see is their house-made strawberry preserves for the toasty English muffins. It has little pectin so it is more syrupy, but studded with real strawberries--kind of hard to describe, but wow! Here, you can't order steak and eggs, but you can get fresh grouper, broiled, served with eggs any way, which--trust me--is a fine, fine meal.

Or there is the fisherman's frittata with crab and shrimp and a buttery roux sauce on top. And the French toast! The breakfast sandwich! The fresh Belgian waffles--with strawberries and, if you like, you can run down to Pinocchio's ice cream just down the way to get some fresh vanilla ice cream for the waffle.

Okay. Maybe now you are getting the picture why my whole family declares the Lighthouse Cafe the best breakfast.

marina

sangria!

Sanibel

Miles of Florida beach--it's impossible to capture the entirety of it. In macro it is one thing, in micro another.

One year, the beach was full of conchs that were washed up from a storm. Last year there were many starfish. This year there was more seaweed and bracken than other years. It's been cloudy with barely a low tide. Usually there are large tide pools to wade through and hermit crabs are plentiful. We haven't seen any so far.

There is a familiarity to Sanibel that comes from 30 years of knowing a place and staying at the same spot of land all this time. But in that familiarity is also the constant change, literally as the tide pushes and pulls, and more generally too as each year the beach's character changes shape.

To fully speak of it or photograph it is impossible. These words and images will have to do.

what the tide brings in

before and after