…as one of our favorite spots so far.
The Place
To get to Fort Pickens you have to drive through Florida
kitsch – souvenir stores the size of Walmart,
multi-story hotels clad in pink stucco, seafood restaurants on every
corner, and traffic, traffic, traffic.
Then, you pass through the gatehouse to the park and you enter another
world. A natural world of dunes, and
beach, and Gulf, and Bay, and sugar white sand, and crystal clear waters, and birds,
and armadillos. And an enormous fort
that was built in the 1840’s and that was used up to and during WWII. 
Fort Pickens is part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore that
includes barrier islands in Mississippi and Florida. It is run by the National Park Service. After you enter, you drive through four miles
of sand dunes and scrub to get to the campground. This is the road that had been closed when it
was flooded in the storm and delayed our arrival. The campground is nice, then you walk out to
the beach. What a Beach! The sugar white sand and emerald waters are
no Madison Avenue exaggeration. The sand
is white, fine and flawless. The water
is crystal clear, and looks emerald green.
The Adventures
Tiki met her first armadillo at Fort Pickens. Tiki LOVES catsand gets very excited and
pulls at the leash when she sees one. As
we were walking her around the campground, she suddenly pulled on the
leash. We (and we think she) thought she
was going to see a cat. It wasn’t a cat,
it was a little armored armadillo! Tiki
got near the armadillo and became confused.
This wasn’t a cat. What was it? Meanwhile the armadillo just continued on its
way, unconcerned. It didn’t flee into
the shrubbery and safety, it just meandered around doing its armadillo
business.
Like Dauphin Island, Fort Pickens is on the flyway for
migrating birds. The storm (that delayed
our arrival) caused a “fall out” where the birds literally fell out of the sky
in the storm. So the place was lousy
with birds and birders. If Russ was
carrying our binoculars, birders would mistake him for one of “them” and approach
him to tell him about their most recent unusual find. Next to our campsite was a field of tiny
purple flowers, no more than 4 inches off the ground. As we looked at them closely, we realized that
the field had tiny ruby throated hummingbirds feeding from the flowers; inches
off the ground just 8 feet from our motor home. (Sorry no pictures for this adventure... so you'll have to settle for another pretty beach shot!)
We only stayed in Fort Pickens 2 nights. We will definitely return here. A friend suggested that we should rate the
places we’ve been. If we were to do that,
Fort Pickens would join Dauphin Island as a 10.
