Its toy trains twinkling coloured lights and plastic dollies are any parent’s diversion-therapy heaven

Its toy trains, twinkling coloured lights and plastic dollies are any parent’s diversion-therapy heaven. This kitsch joint is packed to the gills with eye-catching memorabilia from the 30s, 40s and 50s. For me it was a lack of traffic lights, mailboxes and street lights One savvy shop owner recommended the Bubble Room for lunch. Tacky? Not at all: just part of Cabbage Key’s laid-back charm.The thing that struck George most about the funky Captiva was its glut of blue, bubble-gum ice-cream. The straight-back chairs and painted wooden tables showed their age, while the walls were so thickly plastered with dollar bills left by past visitors that the whole place maintained an eerie gloom even at high noon.

Our destination was a rustic, white-clapboard house built in 1938 by the family of novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart We ordered lemonade on the screened porch This is where Ernest Hemingway once liked to hang out. We zigzagged through go-slow manatee zones, skimming the smooth blue swells between pods of dancing dolphins. We escaped lightly with several shell necklaces, a pair of shell-encrusted sandals and an obligatory “look-where-my-parents-took-me” cartoon conch T-shirt.We hired a motor launch and ventured over to Cabbage Key. Streets are named after shells, and the leading cultural attraction is a museum devoted to them. The shell motif adorns everything from door frames to lampshades. It’s an island gifted with a swell of shells and an army of shell-collectors. George joined them, shuffling along the sand, doubled up in “the Sanibel stoop”.

Passing broad plains of mirrory water, fringed by red mangrove, George pointed out gangly-legged Seuss-style birds and languid alligators basking in the shallows.Next morning we were back for more. Hiring a two-man canoe and paddled deep into the mangrove forest, we traced a web of ancient Caloosa Indian water trails through a weird landscape of distorted roots studded with barnacles.One of the planet’s most unusual barrier islands, Sanibel’s southern end acts like a shovel scooping up all the seashells that the Gulf imports from the Caribbean. We meandered our way around the five-mile loop of its Wilderness Drive. The J N “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge is home to some 238 species of bird, more than 50 types of reptile, and 32 kinds of mammal. Gulf Drive, the other main route, roves past resorts, beaches, and homes at the water’s edge. The houses are perhaps one of the islands’ most recognisable symbols with their plantation shutters and decorative mailboxes morphed into manatees, flamingoes and pelicans.The bike paths are so well maintained, and so flat, that ditching the car and hiring a one-speed cruiser is the only way to explore.

The pay-off is an environmentally-sensitive island 12 miles long and five miles wide, linked to a second just four miles by half a mile. Together they boast 17 miles of powdery beach and 26 miles of bike trails, all in its natural state save low-rise condos, hotels, shops and eateries folded carefully into an indulgent tropical landscape.Sanibel has just two main roads that lie parallel to one another The main drag is Periwinkle Way Prime stop-off is Jerry’s grocery store. The causeway wasn’t built until 1963, sparing these islands much of the high-rise development that has wreaked havoc elsewhere on the coastline.
By the time the causeway did open, Sanibel had been declared largely off-limits to the developers. Sanibel and its pretty little sister island, Captiva, form a dogleg of sand that reaches up from the Gulf Coast off Fort Myers, where the leg joins up with the mainland via a causeway. Were we really here in the theme park capital of the world? Well, yes and no. With so much more to this land than Disney, we’d decided to escape to Florida’s southern tip.

My six-year-old, George, figured it was an apt moment to swim He was right. Moments later, a dolphin mother and baby appeared, larking about just feet away I did a double take. It was 5am and the sun was slowly fingering its way over the horizon. Research has found that those sites that do make changes to their design and functionality often suffer from a significant decline in customer satisfaction as a result.”. Giddy with jetlag, we stumbled on to the beach. “With competitors just two clicks away, reducing customer ‘churn’ is hugely important. [Improved] customer service tools are one way of going about this,” says Lake, “but timely bargains and offering the best user experience is another way of keeping customers happy and loyal.”Site navigation must be easy and intuitive.