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In the fall of 1997, Florida Trend opened a story on Cape Coral's Oktoberfest. Skip it, the magazine said, and "you'll m...
10/25/2026

In the fall of 1997, Florida Trend opened a story on Cape Coral's Oktoberfest. Skip it, the magazine said, and "you'll miss two weekends' worth of l***r, lederhosen and old-time oom-pah-pah." This week Cape Coral's German American Social Club on Pine Island Road is pouring again, Oct 16 to 25.

The German link to Southwest Florida runs deeper than one party. In 1985 Lee County opened its own tourism office in Miltenberg, a German town Florida Trend placed 45 minutes from Frankfurt. The county partnered with LTU, a German airline that flew straight into Fort Myers. By 1996 Lee hosted 126,000 German-speaking tourists, more than double the 1990 count. Down the coast, the Naples tourist bureau claimed 5,000 German residents, and a Naples club called Harmonie ran choral groups and charity work.

German readers got the message. A 2014 headline on the German news site t-online read "In Naples entfliehen die Deutschen dem Winter," or "In Naples, the Germans escape the winter."

The reason it works sits in German law. The Federal Leave Act guarantees at least 24 working days off a year and says leave is to be granted in one block. If it's split, one piece must run at least 12 working days in a row. Two clear weeks make a ten-hour flight an easy call.

And Germans keep their own calendar. Lee County's 2025 visitor tracking shows Germans at 1.3% of visitors in the first quarter and 2.7% in the fourth, their highest share of the year. Discover Airlines, which flies an Airbus A330 from Frankfurt to Fort Myers, plans fewer Florida flights next February and March, a cut the German travel site reisetopia called normal for the season.

Germany still sent Lee County 61,200 visitors in 2025, second among countries only to Canada. In August, Collier commissioners renewed a Stuttgart agency at $180,000 a year to sell the Paradise Coast in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The snowbirds own March. October has a German accent.

If you've ever walked the beach on Sanibel with a lightning whelk in your hand, you've already met one of Paula Michele ...
10/25/2026

If you've ever walked the beach on Sanibel with a lightning whelk in your hand, you've already met one of Paula Michele Wagoner's paintings.

She grew up on the island, and she never put the shells down. In her Shell Siren series, a lightning whelk, a fighting conch and a banded tulip each become a woman of the Gulf. The Littoral Thread, on the cover, shows a mermaid gathering shells in a storm.

Painting started early. She graduated from Cypress Lake Center for the Arts, and Robert Rauschenberg, who lived on Captiva, gave her a scholarship to art school. She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, graduated from UNC Asheville and earned her graduate degree at Western Carolina University.

Then came ten years teaching English as a single mom, plus magazine writing. In one interview, novelist Alice Hoffman told her, "Don't just write what you know. Write what you can imagine." She met her husband and became a painter again. The challenge was relearning the tools, so she studied atelier painting and built her own curriculum around chronic pain management after multiple spine surgeries.

The Greek myths live in the Naples Botanical Garden. Her Demeter and Persephone paintings are set among its sky vine and queen's wreath.

The English teacher never left either. The Rose Wallpaper, now sold, answers The Yellow Wallpaper. Her series Fates and Passions comes from Shakespeare and Yeats. Its newest painting, Before Birnam Wood, sets Macbeth and the three witches in a Southwest Florida swamp.

She's represented by 33 Contemporary in Palm Beach. Dreaming of Bluebirds and Oranges appears in Jackrabbit, a film by Emmy winner Ballard Boyd, screening at the Naples International Film Festival. Every painting goes out in a walnut, cherry or maple frame built by her husband, master carpenter Bryan Wagoner of The Hague Construction.

She's working with Taiwanese painter Lo Chan Peng on a philosophical style built from layers of translucent color. In November she's off to Italy for a month to study painting.

In her words: "You become an artist by making the work."

Last September, 550,259 people passed through Southwest Florida International Airport. That's the Lee County Port Author...
10/24/2026

Last September, 550,259 people passed through Southwest Florida International Airport. That's the Lee County Port Authority's count for the slowest month of the year at the airport most Naples visitors and part-time residents fly into.

Then the numbers climb. October brought 774,689. November, 940,689. December, 1,102,456. From January through April the airport cleared a million passengers every month, and March 2026 hit 1,521,149, close to three times September. The port authority's CEO called it the "best single month in the 43-year history" of the airport, the Business Observer reported. For all of 2025 the airport counted more than 11.1 million passengers.

Who's on those planes? A 2004 University of Florida study of the state's temporary residents found they peak in January and February, and "the average length of stay is five months." The same study ranked Collier fourth in the state for them.

Collier County's planners build that rhythm straight into their math. To estimate peak season, they take the Oct. 1 permanent population and increase it by 20%. Their 2023 projection puts the 2030 peak at 526,938 people countywide.

The airlines are already set up for it. The port authority's September air service update lists new and seasonal routes that start between now and March, among them Delta's daily Raleigh-Durham flight in November, Breeze to Atlantic City and Dayton this month and Sun Country from Duluth in January.

So September's quiet has a shelf life. By March, the region's front door is almost three times busier.

September is the quiet month. March is the loud one.

"We walked the beach and fell in love with each other again, and the beach."That's Judge Judy Sheindlin on the 1999 week...
10/24/2026

"We walked the beach and fell in love with each other again, and the beach."

That's Judge Judy Sheindlin on the 1999 weekend that brought her and her husband, Jerry, to Naples. They'd come close to losing each other first.

She grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of a dentist, and became a New York family court prosecutor. She met Jerry, a lawyer, in a bar. "Judy came walking in and put her finger in my face and said, 'And who is this?'" he told the Los Angeles Times. Mayor Ed Koch made her a judge in 1982, and she went on to hear more than 20,000 cases.

When her father died, she needed Jerry to lean on, and she told him so. "I've been taking care of you for 12 years, now it's your turn to take care of me." They divorced in 1990. Jerry told People he missed her the very first week. In 1991 they married again in a judge friend's chambers, and her vow came with a condition: "In good times or forget it."

Judge Judy debuted in 1996 and ran 25 seasons.
In 1999 a cousin suggested Naples. A weekend at The Ritz-Carlton ended with an apartment in Bay Colony, and for years they spent October through May here, flying to Los Angeles every other week to tape the show. "We do not play golf," she told Gulfshore Life in 2014. Her daughter and her brother bought Naples homes too. Asked about the town, she kept it local: "I don't encourage anybody to come to Naples. I think it's just fine the way it is. It has enough people."

This fall she handed the gavel to her son, Adam Levy, a former district attorney, with four words of advice: "Don't screw this up." Her own last episode of Judy Justice airs October 22, the day after her 84th birthday. Jerry is 92.

"I don't think that I've ever been this content before. I don't have to prove anything else. I did it."

Sources: Gulfshore Life; Los Angeles Times; People; USA Today; What Makes a Marriage Last; Naples Daily News


Every January, a long table in Cambier Park in downtown Naples fills with painted ceramic bowls, about 5,000 of them by ...
10/24/2026

Every January, a long table in Cambier Park in downtown Naples fills with painted ceramic bowls, about 5,000 of them by the count Naples Press reported this year. Each guest picks one, fills it with soup and takes the bowl home.

Empty Bowls Naples started at Barron Collier High School. An art teacher heard a student describe an Empty Bowls event somewhere else and organized one with her class, and the early goal was 500 bowls. Now the bowls come from local potters, artists, educators, students and volunteers, and soup comes from more than 50 restaurants and private clubs.

More than 5,000 people came in January 2026, the 20th year. The money goes to the group's grant program, which gave $215,000 to 15 organizations this year, including food pantries, Meals of Hope, Youth Haven and St. Matthew's House. It has granted about $1.45 million since the program started in 2018.

The 21st Empty Bowls is Saturday, Jan. 16, 2027, in Cambier Park, rain or shine.

Before it was a Four Seasons, the Naples Beach Hotel belonged to one Naples family for 75 years. The firm that helped re...
10/24/2026

Before it was a Four Seasons, the Naples Beach Hotel belonged to one Naples family for 75 years. The firm that helped rebuild it traces back to a college dorm room in Texas.

In 1946, Henry B. Watkins Sr., an executive at a toy cap pistol maker in Ohio, and a couple of friends bought the Naples Hotel along with about 90 percent of the land in town. Beach apartments he bought became the Naples Beach Hotel. Three generations of his family ran it until its 75th and final season in 2021.

In 1984, Michael Dell was a 19-year-old pre-med freshman at the University of Texas, selling computers out of dorm room 2713 with $1,000. By 1998 his fortune had its own investment office, MSD Capital.

On October 14, 2021, The Athens Group and MSD Partners, the firm that grew out of it, closed on the Naples Beach Hotel. The price recorded in Collier County was $362,289,599 for 125 acres and 1,000 feet of beach. About three weeks earlier, MSD had bought Hamilton Harbor Yacht Club near Gordon Pass for $16.625 million. On October 23, 2026, the Hoffmann
family announced it had bought that club.

When Hurricane Milton hit the construction site in 2024, the crew was back at work within 36 hours. Naples Beach Club, A Four Seasons Resort opened November 17, 2025, and HB's, named for Henry B. Watkins Sr., was rebuilt on its original footprint.

The money is still moving along Gulf Shore Boulevard. In September 2026, Apollo and BDT & MSD affiliates put up a $197 million loan for Olana, 12 homes starting at $32 million.

Then there's the $250. Michael and Susan Dell pledged $6.25 billion to put $250 into the Trump Accounts of 25 million kids born from 2016 through 2024, in ZIP codes with a median family income around $117,300 or less. In Collier, it reached kids in Immokalee, Golden Gate, East Naples and Everglades City. "The smartest investment we can make is in who comes next," the Dells wrote.

Sources: Dell Technologies; Gulfshore Life; Gulfshore Business; Naples Daily News; Four Seasons; JLL; Suffolk; Business Observer; HF
Companies; OneDell; Invest America

Presidents have stood at Rookery Bay, walked through Naples Estates and boated out to Keewaydin. On Friday it's FGCU's t...
10/22/2026

Presidents have stood at Rookery Bay, walked through Naples Estates and boated out to Keewaydin. On Friday it's FGCU's turn. President Trump is set to speak at a rally at Alico Arena at 2 p.m., WGCU and Florida Phoenix reported. At least 10 other presidents came to Southwest Florida first.

It goes back to a sea creature. In March 1917, Theodore Roosevelt rode the train into Punta Gorda, and the Tampa Tribune wrote "Punta Gorda went wild over Teddy today." Off Captiva he harpooned two giant manta rays, the bigger one 16 feet 8 inches across.

On Feb. 11, 1929, President-elect Herbert Hoover came to Fort Myers for Thomas Edison's 82nd birthday, riding with Edison, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone. The Edison & Ford Winter Estates says more than 20,000 people watched, in "a town of less than 10,000 people."

Harry Truman dedicated Everglades National Park in Everglades City in 1947, to a crowd on bleachers borrowed from the Ringling circus, and stayed at the Rod and Gun Club. Gerald Ford spent part of Valentine's Day 1976 at the Edison Pageant of Lights in Fort Myers.

Some came for the quiet. A week after losing in 1992, George H.W. Bush went to Boca Grande, and the family kept coming back at the holidays. In April 2004, George W. Bush stood at Rookery Bay in Naples and called it "a little slice of heaven." Jimmy Carter rang in 2005 at Tarpon Lodge on Pine Island, and on New Year's Day 2014, Joe Biden boated out to his brother's house on Keewaydin.

Barack Obama held a town hall at Harborside Event Center three weeks into his term. After Irma, Trump told Naples Estates residents "We're going to be with you 100 percent." After Ian, Biden flew over Sanibel and said "The Sanibel Causeway is ripped in two."

And Oct. 23 keeps coming up. George W. Bush rallied at City of Palms Park on Oct. 23, 2004. Trump rallied in Naples on Oct. 23, 2016. Friday is Oct. 23 again.

In 1929, 20,000 people came out for one. Friday, Fort Myers hosts another.

There's an ankle implant designed in North Naples that's now in the final round to be named the Coolest Thing Made in Fl...
10/21/2026

There's an ankle implant designed in North Naples that's now in the final round to be named the Coolest Thing Made in Florida.

The Florida Chamber's Coolest Thing Made in Florida contest opened this summer with 125 nominated products from all 67 counties. Public voting has narrowed the bracket since August, and two finalists are left.

One is Arthrex's TightRope® PRO implant, an innovative technology surgeons use to repair high ankle sprains. It was developed at the company's global headquarters in Naples and is made at its manufacturing campus in Ave Maria, about 30 miles east. Arthrex says hundreds of thousands of patients have been treated with its TightRope technology since its launch, from everyday people to elite athletes like former NFL tight end Kyle Rudolph, Clemson linebacker Sammy Brown and Indianapolis Colts quarterback Riley Leonard.

The other is Northrop Grumman's E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, the carrier plane with the big radar dish on its back. It's designed and assembled in St. Augustine.

So the final pits something small enough to sit inside an ankle and help people regain their mobility against something big enough to land on an aircraft carrier, and Florida workers build both.

Voting is open through Oct. 23, and you can cast one vote per day at CoolestThingMadeInFlorida.com. The winner will be named Oct. 28 at the Florida Chamber's Future of Florida Forum in Orlando. This is your chance to vote for Southwest Florida innovation.

Sources: Florida Chamber of Commerce, Arthrex, Action News Jax.

Gary Cooper came to a block party in 1951 to celebrate a new clubhouse going up on Park Street in downtown Naples. The b...
10/20/2026

Gary Cooper came to a block party in 1951 to celebrate a new clubhouse going up on Park Street in downtown Naples. The building belonged to the Naples Woman's Club, and the story behind it goes back further.

In 1932, 17 women met at a house on 11th Avenue South and adopted a motto that's still on a marker out front: "Service is the price we pay for the privilege of living in this world." They took it literally. In the 1940s they ran the town's first teen dances and planned a medical clinic that eventually led to Naples Community Hospital. They collected 7,000 books and handed the library to the county in 1959. In 1954 they awarded their first scholarship, to a nursing student.

The clubhouse at 570 Park Street took on 10 to 12 inches of water in Hurricane Ian and reopened in April 2023. Today nearly 350 members keep it running, and in 2025 the club gave back $503,350 in grants and scholarships, including more than $350,000 in scholarships for local students.

Gifted! is how this year's scholarships get funded. Friday, Nov. 13, from 4:30 to 7 p.m., is the Holiday Party: early shopping with curated vendors, w**e, live music, a silent auction and dishes prepared on site by Chef Vincenzo Betulia. Tickets are $150, and there are only 150 of them. Saturday, Nov. 14, from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., the pop-up shops open to everyone with free admission, raffles and auction bidding.

Every purchase goes back into scholarships for Collier County students. Last year, the club gave 53 of them.

Tickets and details at the link in Gifted Holiday Pop-Up Shops' bio.

Rome was a detour.
10/16/2026

Rome was a detour.

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