Flushing out the competition, a Florida restroom has won top honors from Cintas, a company that — among other things — services restrooms.
Voters wasted no time choosing the public restroom at the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island as the top place to poop (we're paraphrasing). The wildlife refuge's bathroom boasts the standard fare, like toilets and sinks, but also has murals depicting local waterlines and wildlife as well as a mangrove scene, each created with photographic tiles. Each stall door has close-ups of local birds, with bird identification on the reverse side of each door for bathroom reading.
The refuge calls these bathrooms "Learning Lavatories" and they streamed past nine other finalists, including big-city restrooms from New York and Chicago as well as west coast restrooms in California. Here's the list of runners-up for America's Best Restroom.
“We’re thrilled that the public is as wild about our restrooms as we are,” Ranger Toni Westland wrote in a press release. “As one of 566 national wildlife refuges around the country, we saw the restrooms as a major missed opportunity for educating visitors, which is why our new Learning Lavatories encourage visitors to become entirely immersed in Refuge habitat and wildlife. We are the first in the entire national refuge system to have a restroom like this, and winning this award is a real honor.”
The refuge wins $2,500 in Cintas products, restroom cleaning and — according to Cintas "bathroom bragging rights."
We're glad to see Florida making a splash.
