Our Last Florida Park

St Joseph Peninsula State Park is the last stop in Florida! We've finished seven weeks of travel and it is time to head back to Maine via Atlanta and Virginia; hard to believe the time has passed so quickly. It is remarkable to note that weather has not prevented us from doing any of our activities.

Sunset over the gulf

As the name suggests, this park is on a peninsula that extends out into the Gulf of Mexico for 20-25 miles. For the beach lover this park has nine miles of amazing white sand and lots of shells for children and adults to pick over. The developed park occupies the first two or so miles and then there is another seven miles of “wilderness” for which one needs a permit for hiking or camping. The trails, however, are “sugar sand” and this makes it harder for trekking and impossible for our bicycles. We hiked only the first mile into the wilderness before cutting over to the beach for our return trip.

David, Buffy, Dee, and Paul and a campfire to drive away the nasty little biting flies.

We were able to get our kayak out into the gulf for our first open water paddling of the trip. The weather was nearly perfect with only a slight breeze and small waves. The swells were not that big either, just enough to make it interesting. The most interesting part of our paddle was seeing two dolphins and a loon.

There are racoons here in the park, along with deer and bobcat. We've only seen the racoons; we saw them first on the eve of our arrival. Last evening in the middle of the night we were startled from a deep sleep by the noise heard a crash bang of metal hitting the ground and realization that it was our grill next to Dee and Paul's camper. Only then did we remember that we had not removed the last two chicken breasts from the grill before we wrapped things up for the evening. Out of sight, out of mind and the loss was two wonderfully grilled breasts. We shall survive.

In order to enjoy the sunset, which everyone seems to want to do, you sit near the water and soak up the last remaining glow of the sun.

The beach is a great place to walk, swim (most of the time) and fish. We have observed that there are maybe more folks fishing than swimming! Some are happy campers catching their dinners while others only seem to catch baby sharks which they return to the water. It is also a great place to watch birds. On our last full day we watched a variety of birds diving into the water after fish. 

One of many shore birds we have seen.

The pelican in the photo has just gotten his head into the water, it's a strange shot in a way but shows how those big birds enter the water at high speed.

This does look strange, but what you see is the body of the pelican with the bird's head just having entered the water.

It is Friday as this is written which means that it is a transition day here at the campground. Quite a few have already packed up and left and other still preparing. We'll be doing that tomorrow ourselves as we start home. Next it will be time for reflection on the campgrounds in Florida; to which would we return and which would be skipped. That's for a later blog.

As we sat in our camper as the heavy rain come down we watched our neighbor's new tent get caught in a strong gust of wind and become completely upended the tent! Our neighbors arrived just as their tent went flying! Of course, we watched them reconstruct their tent, making some repairs to poles as all three of their children played in the large puddles the rain had created!

Saturday morning we awoke to thunder and lightening and decided to get ourselves out of town, as they say. We made it from the park into Port St. Joe where we had breakfast and watched the rain come down in buckets! But, and that is a big but, none of our plans have been affected by rain yet so we in fat city!