Sunset - St. Joseph Peninsula State Park FL (April 12, 2014)

No trip to the Gulf Coast is complete without a beautiful sunset.  Here are some photos from ours!

A Perfect Beach Day on a Perfect Beach, St. Joseph Peninsula State Park FL (April 11, 2014)

The Place 

 As you travel East and South along the Gulf Coast from Panama City, Florida, you enter an area the locals call the Forgotten Coast.  Gone are the high-rise hotels and condos, the franchise eateries, and beach souvenir shops.  What is left are small towns, sugar white sand beaches, and emerald green waters.  Nestled along the Forgotten Coast are 3 Florida State Parks (St. Andrews, St. Joseph Peninsula, and St. George Island) that are anything but forgotten.  They book up 11 months in advance – the earliest that people can make a reservation. 

 

Year after year adventuresome campers flock here for the serenity, the natural beauty, and the sense of timelessness.  We were able to get 2 consecutive nights at St. Joseph Peninsula, but spent the first night in one campsite and moved to another campsite for the next night.  Saturday morning we put our name on a waiting list to see if a spot that was reserved will be vacated early and thus be available for us.

The Adventure

The morning dawned clear and warm with a very gentle breeze.  We took the kayaks down to the beach and (at long last) put our kayaks into the actual Gulf of Mexico.  It was glorious.  We paddled along the shoreline, looking at pristine white beaches.  The water was green and just a little cloudy.  At one point, we found ourselves in the middle of a pod of 6 bottlenose dolphins.  One was a baby.  They gently fed around us, passing by us so closely we could hear them breathe and we could identify one with a scarred dorsal fin.

After lunch we returned to the beach.  Russ swam and Dana waded.  We sat watching the quiet waves lap the shore and nodded off to sleep in the sun.  A Perfect Beach Day!

 The Other Adventure

Early in the morning, Dana bicycled down to the Ranger Station.  On the way back she passed a small grassy area with 7 deer and 6 cattle egrets.  It was the first time she had seen a cattle egret.  The deer would nudge them out of the way with their noses.  The egrets would walk one or two steps away.  The deer would graze over to them again and would nudge them again.  None of the 13 animals were concerned that Dana was 20 feet away madly taking pictures with her phone.  It is that kind of place.

We’re Pickin’ Fort Pickens FL… (April 8-10, 2014)

…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.