Luminary Night on Sanibel

Ok, so Tootie beat me to it as far as blogging about Luminary Night. I figured she would. She is such a night owl. LOL. Anyway, she posted about what their little group did and I'm posting about what Mr. Snowbird and I did.

Luminary Night takes place on Sanibel on the first Friday of December. Luminaria are set up on the bike path on Periwinkle Way all the way from the Lighthouse shoppes to Tarpon Bay Road which means pretty much the entire length of Periwinkle Way. People come from all over to enjoy meeting friends, shopping, but mostly eating and drinking. Every store, restaurant, real estate office etc is open. They all have some kind of drink (usually wine and punch) and snacks--everything from cookies or popcorn to chili and hotdogs. We learned after the first year we did this not to eat dinner before we go!!!

We always drive on Luminary night even though they have trolley service. But there are always such lines for the trolley, it would take you all evening just to get from one place to the other. So--we drive. We decided to go the "back way" using Middle Gulf and Tarpon Bay Road to go to Bailey's Plaza and park there.

The first thing we did was head across the street to the Olde Sanibel Shoppes . Our first stop was at the CROW store to see old friends and to buy Brian Johnson's latest book on CROW called Amazing Animal Stories from CROW. It is a collection of his Case of the Week stories plus lots of great pictures. But, I digress. From there we walked to Amy's Something Special where they had hot chili and wine. Yum. Then on to Suncatcher's Dream where we talked to Daniel (the owner and also CROW board member) and ate. He had a huge spread but the best thing was the shrimp dip. Oh my!! (Note to self--go back to Daniel's when I have more time to shop. He has the neatest stuff!!) Then a stop at the outdoor CROW display to talk to more friends.

From there, we crossed the street and went to Biddle's Bucket (one of our Sanibel Crawler's hangouts). They had quite a spread with wine, quesadillas, cookies, and hush puppies to die for!!

Biddles has a water wall in front of the restaurant and I just happened to get this shot of a guy standing between it and a light. Neat huh?

Bailey's has this cute sleigh with Santa hanging on. Too many presents for good boys and girls for him to actually get in the sleigh!

There is generally music wherever you go. These little guys were playing steel drums in the Bailey Center.

We then got back in the car and drove down to Periwinkle Place. There weren't a lot of cars on the road but the parking lots were packed. I guess most people were parking and riding the trolley. We found a parking place out in back and proceeded to eat and drink our way through Periwinkle Place. There was champagne at Congress Jewelers, ice cream at the ice cream store, meatballs and wine at another store (they all blurred together by this time--probably due to all the adult beverages we had tasted) as well as cookies, popcorn, you name it.

Santa was his usual magical self and appeared everywhere we went. He rode a firetruck (missed seeing this guy but Tootie talks about him in her blog.), and we saw him at Periwinkle Place and Jerrys. And I'm sure if we had gone other places he would have magically appeared there too. Poor little kids had to be confused!

Next on our travels, was Jerry's Shopping Center. We found a parking place in the garage and wandered around there. Jerry's is all decked out with decorations and I will post them later. Jerry's has exotic birds throughout the area. This was just one of them. These birds are all owned by the guy who owns Periwinkle Park. Anyway, the Boy Scouts always serve hotdogs and pop (or soda depending on what part of the country you live in) so we headed out to get our hotdog. Yum!

We then walked next door to the Community Church. They always have tons of stuff going on. They had a bazaar, petting zoo, food, drink, (non adult beverages--after all it is a church!) a Walk Through Bethlehem (which we didn't do because of the huge line.), choirs and the SaniBells. Don't ya love that name? They were playing while we were there and looked like they were having a bell---oops I mean a ball.

We decided that we couldn't eat another thing and were getting tired so we headed home enjoying the view of the Luminaria down Periwinkle Way. This is about our 10th Luminary Night and we have enjoyed every single one and we are looking forward to next years night already.