Estero Bay Preserve State Park, the first aquatic nature preserve established in Florida, is a 10,000-acre (40 km2) Florida State Park located near Estero, between Fort Myers and Naples. It consists of the water, inlets, and islands along 10 miles (16 km) of Estero Bay. Activities include fishing, and boating, bicycling, canoeing, and wildlife viewing. Among the wildlife of the park are gopher tortoises, fiddler crabs, and Bald Eagles. The park is open from 8:00 A.M. until sundown year round.
The old rail bed of the Seaboard Air Line Railway can be found near the Florida Power and Light easement headed northwest. This section has now been orphaned as developments to the north and south have isolated this section. The Seaboard Air Line Railway was once one of two railroads that served southwest Florida and serves as a point of interest in the park on a hike.
Famous quotes containing the words bay, preserve, state and/or park:
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Abject flattery and indiscriminate assentation degrade, as much as indiscriminate contradiction and noisy debate disgust. But a modest assertion of one’s own opinion, and a complaisant acquiescence in other people’s, preserve dignity.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“There are great advantages to seeing yourself as an accident created by amateur parents as they practiced. You then have been left in an imperfect state and the rest is up to you. Only the most pitifully inept child requires perfection from parents.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“The park is filled with night and fog,
The veils are drawn about the world,”
—Sara Teasdale (1884–1933)