A trip to Southwest Florida’s outer islands shows us it really is possible to live without TV and WiFi
It’s one of those Florida days in early summer when mornings are gloriously hot with crisp blue skies and evenings take a mysterious turn, morphing into a spectacle of thunderbolts. Eager to reach my destination — Tarpon Lodge on Pine Island — before the heavens dump buckets of rain, I leave North Fort Myers behind, whizzing across causeways and bridges and cutting through Matlacha, a fishing-village-turned-artist-colony where brightly colored shacks blur into a rainbow as I speed along. The final leg before arriving on the 17-mile-long Pine Island is a stretch of wetlands where telephone poles serve as canvases for local artists who paint decorative fish, hibiscus and manatees on them. I like this place already.