We are seated in the back of a four-wheel-drive van, bouncing across a hypergreen cow pasture, our palms pressed against the roof to keep from flying, when Spot jams on the brakes. Spot is a burly, moonfaced twentysomething from Seattle who fiercely loves Kauai, his adopted island. He works as a guide for an outfitter in Poipu, taking small groups into the forest to leap off waterfalls and soar across rivers on zip lines—the two implausible adventures our son, Isaac, has persuaded us we need to attempt on this particular afternoon. Spot, who talks fast and smiles easily, has been regaling Isaac and the other kids with dumb-tourist jokes when he abruptly turns serious on them: “I want you to look around. Take a mental snapshot of what you see. Because when you’re grown up and you come back to Kauai, all this”—with a sweep of his meaty arm he takes in the broad expanse of grasses and wildflowers racing to meet the cloud-wreathed hills—”will be wall-to-wall condos and golf courses.” An ambitious new development has recently been approved, he explains.

Kauai might not be Kauai for long, Spot is saying, a message probably lost on the kids, though certainly not on their parents. Kauai bills itself as the “Garden Island,” which sounds like empty brochurespeak but turns out to be absolutely and spectacularly true. For sheer intensity of floral life—picture passion vines scrambling over ficus trees, soft beds of nasturtium lining hiking trails, bougainvillea splashing the walls of houses like flung paint—you would have to be inside a flower shop to even come close.

What you hear over and over on Kauai is that this is what the rest of Hawaii looked like 30 or 40 years ago—before the high-rises, before the spring-break hordes, before the shopping malls, fast-food outlets, and Disneyfied luaus. Oh, sure, there is some of that stuff here (this is America, after all), but Kauai is so lightly developed, its landscape still so untouched, that you can’t help feeling blessed for having arrived (for once!) at a place so…before.

Of course this does assume the worst, that the fall from Eden is inevitable, and it’s entirely possible that Spot and I are being unduly pessimistic about the island’s destiny. The state of Hawaii has set aside more than half of Kauai as parkland, and much of the island is probably too rugged and inaccessible to develop. The main road that attempts to circumnavigate the island is forced to give up for approximately 12 miles of utterly impassable coastline. Most of the interior is a roadless, trackless wilderness that can receive as much as 450 inches of rain a year, making it one of the wettest spots on earth. Time-share, anyone?

Friends who know their Hawaiian islands sold us on the place. My wife, Judith, is a landscape painter, and I write about plants, so Hawaii’s westernmost outpost, they said, was perfect for us. The only kink in our plan: 11-year-old Isaac, whose idea of the perfect vacation is a swank resort with pools, palm trees, and gangs of kids armed with Game Boys. “Resort lock,” Judith calls it. Our Kauai challenge was to get our son off the property. Hence the importance of a guy like Spot.

SPLASH RIGHT IN

We begin our spring-break week in the less touristy north, at the extremely low-key but lovely Hanalei Bay Resort. We arrive from California late at night and wake up to a view I won’t soon forget: a horseshoe of pale blue water backed by three mountain ranges ascending in great steps, each offering its own stunning interpretation of the color green. Though the peaks are banked in scary black clouds, an entirely different, much more benign morning—a morning drenched in sunlight—is unfolding down on the bay. The farthest mountain has what appears to be a jagged white tear in its dark fabric: it takes us a while to realize we’re looking at a waterfall that’s nearly as tall as the Chrysler Building.

Considering its size (at 550 square miles, Kauai is smaller than Maui and only slightly bigger than Oahu), the island offers an unrivaled diversity of terrain and climate. The north is comparatively challenging in both respects, which is why the brand-name hotel chains chose to build down in the drier, flatter south, around Poipu. (The exception is the Princeville Resort, a bombastic bit of Florida glass-and-marble plopped down on the eastern lip of Hanalei Bay next to our hotel.) Just west of Hanalei, the Napali Coast begins, and this part of the island has traditionally attracted end-of-the-road types: surfers, backpackers, and hippies. Hanalei, you’ll recall, is where Puff the Magic Dragon lived, and my impression is that a fair amount of puffing goes on there still.

Inhabited Kauai hugs the sunny shore, arrayed along that main road that circles the island like a necklace—but an unclasped one. We start our vacation at one opened clasp (Hanalei) and will end it at the other (Waimea), 12 miles apart as the crow flies; as the rental car drives, however, it takes a good three hours. You have to trace the entire, mostly two-lane road.

Hiking the Napali Coast is high on our list of things to do. The deal with Isaac is that we’ll hang by the resort in the afternoon following a morning “adventure,” a word I figured would sound slightly more appealing than hike. I had no idea how accurate I was being.

After a hotel breakfast of deliciously starchy taro pancakes with guava syrup, we head out, stopping at the small grocery in Hanalei for sunblock, bug spray, and chocolate bars. (In my experience, deft sugar management can add hours to a hike with children.) The town itself is a funky couple of blocks of green frame buildings with red metal roofs housing “shave ice” and smoothie stands, open-air lunch spots, and surf shops—definitely a tourist town, but tourism from a more commercially innocent era.

As we drive west of Hanalei, the houses thin and the road narrows, brushing by little coves and going over creaky wooden one-lane bridges. Just before the end of the road, on the left, is a pair of yawning caves, one dry, the other wet, and both worth exploring. Shortly afterward, the road peters out at the parking lot for Kee Beach, one of the island’s prettiest, if not its safest. Our goal is to hike two miles along the Kalalau Trail to a secluded beach, which sounds a lot easier than it actually turns out to be.

The narrow, rocky trail rises and falls almost 800 vertical feet as it clings to steep curtains of green that plunge into the sea, and is deeply creased into canyons scooped out by swollen streams. This is hiking that requires hands for grabbing overhanging vines, butts for sliding on, and a willingness to get unbelievably dirty. All of which makes the Napali Coast ideal for kids, whose low center of gravity and all-around positive attitude toward mud give them a decided advantage.

As soon as Isaac realizes he can handle the tumultuous terrain better than his parents, he is off leading the way, splashing forthrightly into puddles we daintily try to skirt. “Surrender to the mud” is his advice, and we soon realize how sage it is, since attempting to step along the slippery edges of these quagmires all but guarantees we’ll slide in. The trail is full of children speeding out in front of their parents; you catch up at the next stream or waterfall, where the kids pause to cool off and shed a few pounds of accumulated muck.

This might not sound like your idea of fun (or, for that matter, responsible parenting). And I haven’t even mentioned that it rains on and off the whole way, or that we have to ford a rushing river two feet deep before finally reaching the beach, or that we permanently retire our sneakers at the end of the day. But Isaac will tell you that this is the best hike he’s ever taken: “It has everything I love: mud, rain, rain forest, and ocean.” My own favorite parts are the lightning changes rung by the scenery as it turns on a dime from shadowy jungle to commanding prospect, from blinding floods of sunlight to, well, floods.

When we get back to the resort, Isaac surprises us by announcing that he wants to go snorkeling, something he’s never tried. This is a kid who ordinarily only likes to do things he has already done before, so I’m not about to discourage his newfound adventurism. We’ve heard that Puu Poa, the resort’s beach, is protected by a reef that offers some of the best and safest snorkeling on the island. (Many beaches here have dangerous currents.)

We’ve heard right: the water is crystalline, the coral is painless to touch, and the shifting schools of fish arrive in colored waves like turns on a kaleidoscope. Through Isaac’s mask I can see his face, and it is beaming. After finally dragging himself out of the water, shivering and happy, he has one question: “So what’s on tap for tomorrow?”

EXPEDITIONS “R” US

And that’s the kind of week we have, a series of near daily “adventures,” most of them involving water. Isaac haunts the rack of brochures in the hotel lobby, and we spend a small fortune on outfitters and guides. We almost never do this sort of thing (just hearing the phrase adventure travel makes me want to reach for an umbrella drink), but I’ve come to see kayaks, zip lines, and even helicopters not as gimmicks but as kid-friendly methods of plunging more and more deeply into Kauai’s astounding landscape.

Our third morning we kayak along the Wailua River, which spills into the Pacific about halfway up the island’s eastern coast. After dodging river traffic for the first mile or so, our guide leads our group of maybe 12 up a tranquil tributary. With its banyans, ficus trees, and deep carpets of fern, the scene feels weirdly primordial: you half expect to glimpse a brachiosaur lifting its head above the forest canopy. (Perhaps that’s why Steven Spielberg filmed much of Jurassic Park here.)

After an hour of paddling, we beach the kayaks, cross the swollen river by clinging to a rope stretched across it, and trek through a mile of astonishingly lush—and astonishingly muddy—jungle on the way to our lunchtime destination, a towering waterfall where the kids shower off in what looks like a five-story curtain of light.

On a sunbaked boulder beneath the thundering falls, I think about Kauai’s great theme: water. Basically the island is an elegant contraption for extracting water from the trade winds and recycling it back into the Pacific—but not before using it to grow flowers, carve canyons, build waterfalls, and generally beautify itself. Kauai was the first in the series of volcanoes that once upon a time sprang up from a vent in the Pacific floor to create the Hawaiian archipelago. Think of that episode of island-building as a terrestrial challenge to the watery status quo; the water has been working ever since to erase these upstart islands, and is further along in that project on firstborn Kauai than on any of its siblings. The moist trade winds bump up against Kauai’s highest mountain peaks, which causes the clouds to drop 37 feet of rain every year, and as all that water works its inexorable way back to the ocean, coursing down the island’s rivers and streams and bounding over its falls, it is slowly but surely bringing the island with it. It might take another million years to wash Kauai away completely, but that’s the plan. (And I was worried about overdevelopment!) Once we realize that we (like the island) have no choice but to yield to the water, Kauai’s occasionally torrential rains, which never last very long, stop feeling like an affront to our vacation.

DRYING OFF

Yet in the south, where we spend the latter part of our stay, you can pretty much escape the downfalls. Here, in the rain shadow of the interior mountains, the terrain is not nearly so spectacular. But the Hyatt Regency Kauai in Poipu does its best to compensate by simulating a tropical landscape with a riverine pool that meanders among ferns and flowering ginger on its way to an elaborate two-story waterslide, which Isaac pronounces “hellatight”—at the moment the highest praise a kid from California can bestow. In addition to the resort’s two lovely pools (one is restricted to adults), the Hyatt also has a five-acre saltwater lagoon with a white-sand beach and palm-studded islands.

Because the Hyatt Kauai is such a handsome and well-managed resort, with decent food and plenty of activities for both kids and adults (lei-making workshops, luaus, water sports), the place is a breeding ground for resort lock. Isaac quickly joins a pack of kids and is more than happy to stay put. So while he plays volleyball in the pool and charges soft-serve cones at the snack bar, I take off for a 2 1/2-hour tour of Poipu’s wonderful Allerton Garden. We do manage to tear Isaac away for a two-mile hike to Waipoo Falls along the precipitous lip of Waimea Canyon, through a stark red-desert landscape that could not have contrasted more sharply with Napali’s lushness (the relatively arid western side of Kauai looks uncannily like the American West, with plunging canyons, pastel geology, and sublime prospects). But we almost surely would be pinned down at the Hyatt for the rest of our vacation had we not already made a reservation to go on that zip-line safari, an expedition Isaac has been looking forward to all week.

My own expectations are not high (a zip-line safari?!), but our afternoon with Spot proves to be one of the most exhilarating of our trip. After a 10-minute hike in from the trailhead where Spot parks the van, we find ourselves at the bottom of Kipu Falls. Someone has rigged up an aluminum ladder on one side of the falls; the ladder meets a rope swing hung from a huge banyan limb high above. Spot nudges the adults in the group to “get outside your box” and make the leap, but most of us demur, preferring an unadventurous swim in the deep, cool pool below. Isaac, however, needs no prodding; he scampers up the ladder and, after a moment’s hesitation, throws himself off the rock cliff. “The first time was hella scary,” he confides later. “When you’re falling your stomach rises in your torso and you go, ‘Oh, my God, why did I do this?’ You feel like you’re going to fall forever. Then you’re underwater and you say, ‘Hey, I’m not dead!’ That’s when it starts to feel good. And then you say, ‘I’m going to do it again!’” Which he does, again and again and again.

After an hour or so, Spot leads us downriver to the zip line, 100 yards of steel cable strung between a tremendous banyan and mango tree on either shore. Around the ancient tree on our side of the river Spot’s company has erected an elaborate four-story structure of wooden platforms, linked by steps: the ultimate in tree-house architecture.

We don rock-climbing harnesses and helmets and mount to the highest platform, where Spot tests our gear. When my turn comes, he clips my harness to the zip line and asks if I want to go facing forward or backward. (Backward?!) All that is left to do now is jump. Out of a 50-foot-high tree. Spot convinces me that the rig is safe (it’s been designed, built, and certified by something called the Association of Challenge Course Technology, which for some reason I find reassuring), but I guess I still have my box to climb out of.

Spot whispers exactly the right word of encouragement, and I duly proceed to jump, face-first. After a few nanoseconds of heart-stopping free fall, I feel the line suddenly seize up and throw me forward in a headlong Tarzan swoop across the river to a platform on the far shore. I can’t quite believe this is me, flying like a big awkward bird, screaming like a complete idiot—but an ecstatic idiot. Hokey it may be, but zip-lining turns out to offer quite a rush—and not a bad way to be in these wonderful woods.

As we head back to the van, Isaac and Judith and I recapping the afternoon, I realize that Isaac is as proud of us for trying the zip line as we were of him for his intrepid Napali hike earlier in the week. “This has been one of my most perfect days ever,” Isaac declares. And that is perhaps Kauai’s greatest gift: the island’s excellent adventures have aligned an 11-year-old’s idea of the perfect day with our own.

A fundamental axiom of the Family Vacation holds that if the kids have a good time, then the vacation is a success. This is more or less true, and yet, if you’re a parent, it’s also a little”¦ pathetic. Because it means that your own enjoyment of a place is simply a by-product of your child’s. That’s a perilous emotional logic, for where it usually leads, as swiftly and inexorably as a water slide, is to yet another week at Disney World.

Not that the obvious alternative is anything to get excited about: dragging the kids, I mean, to Sites of Significant Cultural or Natural Interest, a high-friction slog that can leave you savoring the tranquility of that first Monday back at the office. Factor in a child such as Isaac—a somewhat quirky, none-too-flexible eight-year-old who objects on principle to doing/eating/experiencing anything he hasn’t done/eaten/experienced in the past—and this sort of vacation quickly becomes more work than work. The last time I told Isaac we were thinking of going somewhere new, he gave me a look of genuine pity. “Remember, Dad,” he said, bouncing his thumb off his chest, “this is Captain Picky.”

Judith and I had all but decided to shelve family travel for the foreseeable future when a friend suggested we check out Sanibel and Captiva islands, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, which he claimed in no uncertain terms constituted “the easiest family vacation in America.” I was skeptical, not just because I associate Florida with too much development and too many early-bird specials, but because I couldn’t believe a place that was “easy” could also be interesting. I was wrong. Somehow, Sanibel Island manages to be both.

The easy part first. The grooves of a vacation week on Sanibel are well-worn but agreeably smooth: Rent a two-bedroom condo on the beach (you can tour hundreds of units on the brokers’ Web sites [see The Facts]); fly in on a Saturday (when the leases all start); stock up on everything you’ll need (fresh fish, groceries, wine, beer, beach reads, sunblock) at Jerry’s; rent bikes first thing Sunday morning; and settle in. Sure, you can go wild—stay at a resort instead, eat out every night, arrive on a Tuesday—but this is one case in which conformity to custom has its rewards.

Sanibel and its smaller, narrower sister island, Captiva, form a slightly bent arm of sand reaching up from the Gulf Coast off Fort Myers, where the arm is joined to the mainland by a causeway. The causeway wasn’t built until 1963, so up to that point the islands were spared the thoughtless high-rise development that has wrecked so much of the Florida coast. By the time the causeway opened the floodgates, visionary land-use controls had been put in place. Fully two-thirds of Sanibel has been declared off-limits to development and left in its natural state: mostly spartina grass in the highlands and mangrove swamp in the low. Along the beach no building may exceed the height of a palm. Today the island’s gulf coast wears a long white necklace of low-rise condos, most of them invisible from the shore road, carefully folded into groves of stately palm and feathery Australian pine.

Your typical Sanibel condo complex consists of a trio of three-story buildings around a pool and is connected to the beach by a narrow boardwalk on stilts, to protect the fragile dunes. What the individual units lack in distinctiveness or charm—picture coral carpeting, Kmart wicker, and every seashell tchotchke known to man—they more than make up for in spaciousness, convenience, and water views.

In the company of Captain Picky, eating dinner out is seldom a treat. (C.P. is even finicky about McDonald’s, preferring the cuisine at certain higher-volume outlets to that at others.) For us, being able to cook dinner ourselves is a boon, especially when there are communal gas-fired Webers by the pool, and a screened terrace with a nightly view of a fiery sun capsizing into the pale blue gulf. So while the Captain picked at his pasta cooked just so, Judith and I ate grilled fish or shrimp in a setting to rival any island restaurant’s.

An important corollary to the axiom of the Family Vacation is that if the kids can meet other kids early on, everyone benefits. This is almost guaranteed to happen here—the scale and layout of Sanibel’s condo complexes are just right for fostering a marvelous sense of community. (The fact that everyone arrives and departs on the same day contributes to the instant-community effect.) By midweek Isaac’s new buddies, Soren, 7, and Ingrid, 11, from Iowa, had been over for dinner and out for miniature golf, and he’d spent a cloudy afternoon at their condo making seashell refrigerator magnets. (The shell motif is inescapable.)

There’s probably an optimal number of families around the pool to facilitate not only kids striking up friendships but also their parents getting well enough acquainted to keep an eye on one another’s broods. (A minimum of six families, I’d venture, max of 10.) By Tuesday the dads were taking turns in the pool playing with the gang of kids (a blessing, because when you’re off duty you can actually read your book with both eyes), and before long kids were running in and out of our various units in search of the best-stocked fridge, like some sweet dream of suburbia circa 1962.

In fact, Captain Picky found condo life so much to his liking that he never wanted to leave the grounds, which posed a problem for his parents. The easy part of a week on Sanibel threatened to cancel out the interesting parts, most of which lie beyond the condo gates. There is, for instance, the beach, a spectacular strand of sugary sand that runs the length of the island and offers some of the best shelling in the world. (From dawn to dusk you see people doubled over in “the Sanibel stoop,” as if an entire society had simultaneously lost their contact lenses.) Captain Picky felt that the shells on sale in the shops were far superior to the ones on the beach (true enough), so what exactly was the point? Birding, another excellent Sanibel diversion, struck him as equally purposeless, and Isaac isn’t yet good enough at biking to really enjoy it.

So the first few days, Judith and I took turns exploring the island by bicycle, without a doubt one of the most exhilarating pleasures it has to offer—and perhaps the ultimate Sanibel marriage of easy and interesting. Easy because the island’s bike paths are so well maintained and flat that you don’t need to shift gears or even be in shape, and interesting because the landscape is so captivating. Twenty minutes after leaving Condo World I was deep within the J. N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge, riding along dikes that bisect broad plains of still water fringed with mangroves. Prehistoric-looking birds on improbably tall stilts patrol the mirrored waters, which are flustered every now and then by the silver flash of a mullet.

I found the areas outside Sanibel’s nature preserves just as striking. The island is divided into two sovereign kingdoms, Nature and Civilization, making it a place of startling frontiers. In the very same frame, you can watch a poodle romping on a manicured lawn and an alligator sunning itself on a mudbank. Somehow, it works: the unreconstructed, swampy wild appears to be thriving in the very shadow of Condo World. (Somehow, too, there seemed to be virtually no bugs.)

While biking around the island, wondering about how I might entice Isaac away from the pool and into this landscape, I hit on an idea. One thing Captain Picky does like is games—we’d organize a Sanibel Island treasure hunt for Isaac and his pals. So I drew up a list of a dozen creatures, plants, and shells likely to be findable on the beach, at “Ding” Darling, or just while walking around: lizard; alligator; snowy egret; saw palmetto; bromeliad; roseate spoonbill; fighting conch shell; banded tulip shell; oyster shell; tortoise or turtle; osprey; sand dollar. Judith, a painter, made simple sketches to illustrate each one. Whoever ticked off all the boxes on the checklist first would win the (under $5) souvenir of his or her choice.

Suddenly “Ding” Darling was no longer “a boring old swamp” but a vast storehouse of potential points, and Isaac and Soren couldn’t wait to go. It was low tide when we arrived, and right away we spotted through our car window a flock of roseate spoonbills—an awkward, pink, Dr. Seussian shorebird—snagging minnows in the shallows. Later we spied a saw palmetto, and a pair of adolescent alligators snoozing in the mud. Captain Picky’s competitive instinct now fired, he drew me aside to ask if we might get up early the next morning to go shelling on the beach before his opponent was awake.

For the rest of the week, Isaac was eager to venture out beyond Condo World, bringing his checklist and eagle eye everywhere we went. Hoping perhaps to knock off a few more boxes, he joined us on a water tour of “Ding” Darling, which turned out to be a high point of our week. Following a blond naturalist-dude, a dozen of us in one- and two-person kayaks paddled deep into the mangrove forest, tracing a web of water trails through one of the weirdest, most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. The canopy of trees closes overhead, forming cool, shadowy tunnels walled in by extravagantly contorted roots crusted with oysters (check!) and barnacles. Because the black water was so still, Isaac and I went several miles with ease, adding egrets and bromeliads to his checklist, not to mention an Actual New Experience to the heretofore rather thin official Captain Picky biography. Unfolding our legs from the kayak after three hours, we both felt a sense of triumph.

AFTER A WEEK ON SANIBEL WE PULLED UP stakes and made the half-hour drive north, crossing the two-lane bridge onto Captiva and entering a very different world. Captiva is a six-mile-long finger of land lined with powdery white beaches and, in place of condos, grand houses, many of them rentable by the week. Occupying the entire northern third is the sprawling South Seas Resort, where we spent our last couple of days.

It’s a pleasant walk from the resort to the town of Captiva, a compact district of restaurants and shops that is funkier than the commercial strip on Sanibel. Andy Rosse Lane, the main street, runs right to the beach—and to the Mucky Duck, a legendary English pub where, at sunset, adults sip ale at picnic tables while kids play ringtoss beneath a towering pine.

But there’s tons to do without ever leaving the 330-acre resort—from shuffleboard and fishing to parasailing, waterskiing, and sailing, to golf and tennis and crafts and swimming, either in 18 pools or off two miles of blindingly white beach. The resort’s trolley means older kids can get around on their own. They can also charge ice cream cones on their folks’ South Seas credit cards and put together their own Good Time from the kit of parts the resort offers them. For a teen or preteen, I imagine, the South Seas Resort would be as much a utopia as Condo World was for Captain P.’s younger set.

Eager to break out of the somewhat bland bubble of the resort, on our last afternoon we chartered a motorboat and set out to explore the unpeopled islands to Captiva’s north. Our second adventure-by-water wound up being easily as memorable as the first. Our captain, Brian Holaway, not only knows the local waters intimately, but is also up on botany, shells, birds, fish, geology, history, archaeology, and Indian lore; plus, he has a deft touch with kids. As we motored north toward Cayo Costa—where the shelling was unrivaled, we’d heard (by now we too were hooked)—the boat threaded its way through go-slow manatee zones, between pods of arcing dolphins, and past great blue herons fishing intently in the tidal flats. After a half-hour ride, Brian tied up at a rickety dock on Cayo Costa, a paring of pristine land that’s a state park. We crossed the pencil-thin island on a boardwalk raised above a shadowy mangrove swamp. Within minutes the boardwalk abruptly ended in a breathtaking crescent of beach we had all to ourselves. Isaac and I went for a swim, joined by a trio of dolphins drawing lazy loops in the water with their dorsal fins no more than 30 yards away.

The shelling was good if not quite as spectacular as advertised, but with help from Brian, Isaac managed to complete his checklist: together they found an intact sand dollar and a piece of a sea turtle’s shell that the contest judge (i.e., me) ruled acceptable. By the end of the afternoon, Captains Picky and Holaway were fast friends, and Isaac had learned not only how the Calusa Indians made rope from palm fronds, but, for the first time in his life, about some of the pleasures of the new, which is to say, of travel.

CAPTAIN PICKY’S PICKS

THE BEST OF SANIBEL AND SURROUNDINGS

Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum 3075 Sanibel-Captiva Rd.; 941/395-2233. “They have a treasure hunt for kids, and you can pick a shell to take home. But the slide show is bor-ing.” Mona Lisa’s Pizza 2440 Palm Ridge Rd.; 941/472-0212. “Really good pizza. And there’s a TV showing the Cartoon Network, but no sound.” Three Crafty Ladies 1620 Periwinkle Way; 941/472-2893. “This is where to get the magnets and glue to make shell magnets.” Butterfly House Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation’s Nature Center, 3333 Sanibel-Captiva Rd.; 941/472-2329. “You go inside a big tent and butterflies land on your head.” Pinocchio’s 362 Periwinkle Way; 941/472-6566. “There’s a lot of good ice cream on Sanibel, but this is my favorite. The sundaes are immense.” Tuttles 362 Periwinkle Way; 941/472-0707. “Baskets with shells and stuff for under a dollar. I got a shark-tooth necklace.” Castle Golf 7400 Gladiolus Dr., Fort Myers; 941/489-1999. “Awesome miniature golf, with tons of water features. We go on our way to the airport.”

THE FACTS

Several real estate brokers handle weekly rentals of condos and houses on both islands; find their links at www.leeislandcoast.com, the Lee Island Coast Visitor & Convention Bureau’s Web site (or call 888/231-6933). Rates fluctuate, depending on the season (mid-January to April is peak). During school vacation weeks, expect to pay $2,000 to $3,000 for a two-bedroom beach condo, half that in the off-season. Rentals are Saturday to Saturday and include linens. Housekeeping and baby-sitting services are often available through your broker, who is also a good person to ask about restaurants and boat charters.

SANIBEL

Billy’s Rentals 1470 Periwinkle Way; 941/472-5248; bikes from $35 a week. You can rent all manner of bicycles (and kid attachments) by the hour, day, or week, but don’t bother going for anything fancy: there are no hills ahead. Free delivery.

Jerry’s Foods 1700 Periwinkle Way; 941/472-9300. Grocery with a good bakery and extensive wine selection.

Bowman’s Beach Off Sanibel-Captiva Rd. Should you tire of your condo’s pool and beach, take a drive to what’s considered Sanibel’s most gorgeous stretch of sand.

Gramma Dot’s 634 N. Yachtsman Dr., Sanibel Marina; 941/472-8138. Standout seafood and salads, served dockside.

J. N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge 1 Wildlife Dr.; 941/472-1100; closed to cars Fridays. Though most people go to the main refuge on Sanibel-Captiva Road — best at low tide, when the shorebirds feed — the smaller Bailey Tract, 100 acres of spartina grasses and marshes, is worth a visit. And you’ll have the place to yourself.

Lighthouse Café 362 Periwinkle Way; 941/472-0303. Terrific fruit pancakes and fish sandwiches at this popular breakfast and lunch spot (and we mean popular — expect to wait at least 30 minutes for a table).

Tarpon Bay Recreation 900 Tarpon Bay Rd.; 941/472-8900; www.tarponbay.com; guided kayak and canoe tours $25 for adults, $12.50 for children under 12. Rent canoes and kayaks for fishing or exploring “Ding” Darling, on your own or with their knowledgeable guides.

CAPTIVA

Around the Sound Tours 941/849-8687; $200 for three hours. Motorboat charters with Captain Brian Holaway.

Bubble Room 15001 Captiva Dr.; 941/472-5558. A cartoony warren of rooms jam-packed with vintage toys, trains, and Hollywood memorabilia. Some people swear by the food, but I make it a point not to eat in any restaurant with a gift shop and a two-hour wait.

Mucky Duck 11546 Andy Rosse Lane; 941/472-3434. Be sure to have at least a beer here at sunset. And they do serve duck.

R. C. Otter’s 11506 Andy Rosse Lane; 941/395-1142. Casual place for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Fried fish, shrimp, salads, microbrews, and kids’ fare.

South Seas Resort 5400 Captiva Rd.; 800/227-8482 or 941/472-5111; www.south-seas-resort.com; doubles from $145, two-bedroom cottages from $365, kids under 16 free.