Most anniversary orders that land in this city were placed by somebody who has never driven Bonita Beach Road. Bonita Springs has one of the older resident profiles in Florida, and the arithmetic of that is straightforward: the fortieth, fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries here outnumber the fifth, and they are very often bought by adult children in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois or Ontario for parents who moved down years ago. That shapes the order in ways worth planning for. The person paying cannot confirm whether the gate is manned. They may have the condo number from an old address book rather than from this season. They frequently want the flowers to be waiting when the couple gets back from dinner, which means the delivery is really two decisions — where the couple will be at six o'clock, and who can let a runner in before then. If you are that out-of-state sender, the most useful thing you can do is call one of the couple's neighbors or the club, not the florist. Give us the community name, the unit or villa number, a phone number for the recipients, and a morning window, and the hard part is solved.
The venue map for a Bonita anniversary dinner runs from Coconut Road down into Naples. Inside the city, the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point Resort and Spa on Coconut Road is the large resort address, sitting on the Estero Bay side with its own restaurants and a concierge desk that handles guest deliveries as routine business. The Promenade at Bonita Bay on Tamiami Trail is the city's upscale open-air cluster of restaurants and shops, and Angelina's Ristorante on the Trail is the fine-dining name most Bonita couples say when they mean a milestone dinner. Twenty minutes south, the Naples resort strip is where a genuine anniversary weekend usually happens: the Ritz-Carlton on Vanderbilt Beach Road, LaPlaya Beach and Golf Resort out at Vanderbilt Beach, the Naples Grande, and the Inn on Fifth in the middle of the Fifth Avenue South restaurant district. North in Estero, Coconut Point carries the everyday dining. A note that saves disappointment: restaurants here will rarely accept an arrangement to be presented at a table, and a bouquet handed over at a valet stand spends the evening in a hot car. Send it to the house or to the hotel front desk ahead of the reservation instead.
The clubhouse route is the one outsiders never think of and it works beautifully for a milestone. Nearly every gated community in this city is organized around a club with a staffed front desk — Bonita Bay Club, Pelican's Nest at Pelican Landing, The Colony, Shadow Wood in the Brooks off Coconut Road, Spanish Wells, Palmira, Worthington, Vasari, Bonita National at the east end of Bonita Beach Road. If the couple has a standing Friday dinner at their club, the club will usually hold an arrangement and put it on the table, and that is a far better outcome than a bouquet cooking on a porch. It requires one phone call to the club in advance and the member's full name as the club has it, because a desk that cannot match a name will not accept a delivery. The same logic applies to the residential side: a manned gate passes a runner through on a name that is on the list, while a keypad gate with an empty booth stops the delivery entirely unless there is a call-ahead number on the order.