St Andrews State Park, Panama City Beach

We drove a big 90 miles west of Apalachicola, Florida on Thursday, Feb 22 to Panama City. We took the Gulf of Mexico coastal highway that traveled beside beautiful snowy white beaches with emerald colored waters. We did see some evidence of hurricane damage, but mainly in the form of dead trees from the water surge. Our destination was St. Andrews State Park that was located on Panama City Beach. We had a gorgeous site right on the water. The Florida State Parks are first rate and we haven’t seen a bad one yet. This park had sites right on the water, a fishing pier, lakes with birds and alligators, an ecological interpretive center and a lovely white sand Gulf beach. The beach was one of the most beautiful that we’ve seen yet, and had a great variety of shells for collecting.

The local seafood is absolutely wonderful. We’ve enjoyed local oysters, grouper, Mahi Mahi and shrimp. We haven’t seen that much crab, but we’re still looking.

We have enjoyed meeting and talking with people in the campgrounds. The campers are mainly from all over the eastern U.S. and Canada (mainly retirees, except on the weekends when many local families arrive). The week days are quiet and the weekends are more boisterous.

One highlight of our trip has been to visit family and friends along the way. We had a wonderful catch up visit with an old friend from Huntsville, Alabama, Jane M, who now lives in Niceville. We were very sorry to hear that her husband Jack had passed away in 2005 from leukemia.

We were all in our twenties when we lived in Huntsville. We were there because of the work at Marshall Space Fight Center. Jack, Jane and John worked as support contractors for NASA. Back then the center director was Werner Von Braun and the job was to design and build the Saturn V launch vehicle, used to send the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Those were heady days!

We reminisced with Jane about sports car rallying, boating and things that twenty year olds do.

While in Florida, we have also connected with relatives. John spent time with his brother Jim, who is wintering in St Augustine, and Pris saw her Aunt Larry and Cousin Shelby and husband. Too bad we are all so far apart.

St George Island State Park, Florida

On Feb. 19 we headed to the Florida Panhandle and St. George Island State Park. It’s on an island located in the Gulf of Mexico just off of Apalachicola, Florida. The campground is located in a pine forest that is separated from the beach by sand dunes. It’s just a short walk to the pristine, white, sandy beach where shells and birds abound. There are two ponds on either side of the road that leads to the beach, and they are both inhabited with alligators. We saw an 8’ gator on our walk to the beach, but didn’t see it on our way back to our campsite. It made for some fast walking since we didn’t know where the gator was.

The campground was completely full, mainly with “snow birds” from the northern U.S. and Canada. Thank goodness John planned ahead and made reservations. Anyone planning to visit Florida State Parks in the winter, needs to make advance reservations (they are all full).

The highlight of Apalachicola Bay is that it has lots of oysters. It supplies 10% of the oysters for the U.S. John is trying his best to help the local economy by eating his fair share. One restaurant on the waterfront that we ate at had oysters served 12 different ways. Eat your heart out Jeff and John.

The oysters are harvested with specially built flat wooden boats (see photo). The oystermen use long rakes to scoop up the oysters. People in the campground even went out and got their own oysters. Pris preferred the restaurant prepared variety.

While taking a walk through the pine forest, we noticed the trunks of many trees had a section of their bark removed. It looked just like the trees in Canada where they removed the bark to collect sap for maple sugar. In this case, however, the sap was removed and distilled to form turpentine.

Suwannee River, Florida

We arrived back in Florida from our two month holiday break. We visited with family in Jacksonville, took a car trip to Sarasota, where we stayed with our good friends Pete and Bonnie, and even had a catch up lunch with our Gator friends (formerly of La Crescenta) Judy and Bill. We traveled back to NE Florida to check on the motor home, which was being stored in St. Augustine. It was in good shape except that we had a dead battery and the air conditioner wasn’t working. Coach Net came out and jump started us so we could make it to Camping World where all was fixed.

We traveled inland and to the west of Gainesville on Feb 16 and stayed at a county park (Hart Springs). We used the Foghorn Outdoors Florida Camping book to find this park. Most of the campgrounds listed in Trailer Life are private, with paved parking lots, and very busy. We much prefer the larger, more secluded sites in state and county parks. The Foghorn Books give a great description and rating of all the parks.

Hart Springs had 60 large sites and was located off the beaten track. It was quiet and less than half full. We picked it because of its proximity to the Suwannee River. The Suwannee is a beautiful meandering river with large oak trees along the shore with Spanish moss hanging from them . During our walk along the river, we came across a sign warning fishermen to watch out for jumping sturgeon, because people had been hurt by these large nonnative fish jumping into boats.

Since we were only 25 miles to the west of Gainesville, a trip to the University of Florida was in order. (Whose national champions?) We walked around the campus and reminisced about old times and even saw the site where John proposed to Pris.

Our big adventure was that the temperature dropped to 21 degrees (it broke the all time record for low temperatures) and necessitated keeping the water dripping all night. The only problem was that the water pump that supplied the water to the campground froze, and at 3:30 AM we had no outside hookup water to drip. John saved the day (or night, in this case) by staying up and turning on our faucets every 15 minutes to keep the water flowing. Luckily, we had a small amount of water stored in our tanks. Pris contributed her bit by going back to bed.