Otherwise today was a great day
Beth and I finally made it out to Honeymoon Island for a good hike. I’d been waiting to take my new camera out to the park to hunt for some good pictures, and by golly, today was an excellent day for it. We had a high around 80 with a nice sea breeze to mix up the air a little… what you might call a chamber of commerce kind of day… one for the brochures.
I posted a bunch of the pics on flickr, on the off chance you might be interested in taking a look. Most of you have seen Honeymoon Island, and those of you who haven’t have probably seen “the real Florida” before. In that case, I won’t mind if you take a pass.
Once again, I’m taking a little bit of liberty with the post tag. Going a few miles down the road hardly qualifies as “travel.” I’m sticking with it anyway. When you hike out to the end of the island, it’s easy to imagine your far away from the city. It’s so quiet and peaceful it’s hard to come back.
I haven’t been to that park, but I’ve been all over that area. I’ve done some kayaking just south of there (around Pine Island). My sister’s in-laws live on an island just south of there, and we go down around the holidays sometimes (but not this year).
We were charged by a wild pig on a hike at the Hillsborough River State Park. I’ll bet a wild pig has nothing on a bear, but a pig is just about as much excitement as I can handle.
I think Caladesi Island may be similar to Cayo Costa, except you can’t camp there (besides a couple restrooms and a dock, there’s only one permanent structure on Caladesi). It’s a great natural beach. You can only get to Caladesi by ferry or private boat, but it’s only something like five miles from here (as the crow flies), and we had a boat. We practically grew up there (after we moved here from New England). And oh, the sand is so white and soft it’s almost like walking on a beach full of dry flour. When it’s not so hot (re: spring, summer, or early fall) it’s really quite nice.
As much camping as we’ve done, we’ve never been camping near the beach, which might be kind of cool. There’s a really nice county park down in St. Pete with an old fort (off of Tampa Bay) that has some water-side camping, but we never seem to go (somehow it seems wrong to go camping twenty minutes from home).
I don’t always speak well of Florida, but I must say that one thing I do like is all the parks we have – especially in this county. Between city, county, and state parks, there at least ten different parks within a ten minute drive (and two within walking distance). I wouldn’t be surprised it there’s more than that (I think there are more than a dozen county parks – many of them are further away though). That’s not too bad, considering this is the most densely populated county in Florida, and I know it’s way more than there were growing up outside of Boston. If you like the outdoors, it’s not like living outside the city, but for suburbia it isn’t bad.
Jeez! Listen to me go on and on. I don’t know where all of this came from.
Have you ever been over to Cayo Costa? I went camping there once, its pretty cool…wild pigs running around at night on the dunes.