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.