Edison Festival of Light — Local services in Fort Myers

I've never been fortunate enough to see the parade, but I finally did this year. Didn't make it out until around 830 at night, but there was still plenty of parade, as it didn't stop until 1030.

There were some really cool floats and lit up vehicles, one of my favorite being LCEC's truck.

I was with a group of people in downtown Fort Myers, near first Street, and it wasn't difficult to view the parade at all. People were nice and friendly, and we didn't have any issues with people around us.

The only unfortunate thing was that one of the classic cars driven by the Shriners overheated and caught fire. The fire truck made it quickly enough, and police responded quickly, but it held up the parade by about 15 minutes and people started leaving thinking it was over.

For the people left in the parade waiting for the car to be dealt with, there was a fraction of the crowd that was there earlier, and I felt sorry for them having to perform for the small amount of us...

We love this parade! It’s a night parade, so it is all about the lights… plus Edison made the light bulb so yeah. We go every year and show up downtown way in advance, as this parade is packed! We usually arrive around 3pm for 7pm parade. We find our spot along the parade route, set up our lawn chairs and then go out for dinner before the restaurants get crazy busy (one year it took 2 hours to get our pizza order). No one bothers the chairs so we just enjoy the area. Then we sit down for the 2-3 hour parade! The kids loved having all of the lights and sounds! The bands are great, the floats are impressive and the community really comes out! Thing to note: it takes a long time to leave downtown after the parade, just relax and accept that. We try to use back routes to speed it up a bit but it’s an hour trip for our normally...

The parade this year was a shadow of what it once was. There were perhaps 2 actual high school bands. The rest of the bands were small remnants (rather than complete bands) just beating drums. The floats - much fewer than I recall seeing from a couple of decades go. This used to be a such a major regional event - bands from all over the Southern half of FL and floats from the Orange Bowl parade etc. Hopefully, you can get this back to where it used to be. Would love to share the great memories that I had with my young...