Cozy Rosie: Big Lagoon State Park - Pensacola, Florida (March 2019)

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Big Lagoon State Park - Pensacola, Florida (March 2019)

One of our family’s long-standing camping traditions was to spend spring break camping at T.H. Stone St. Joseph Peninsula State Park in Florida. This was a wonderful park and one of our favorites.

Was?

We are not there this year and the park is probably empty. That’s because Hurricane Michael turned the peninsula into multiple islands. You have to use a boat to get to it. Port St. Joe Peninsula State Park is closed and unlikely to reopen anytime soon.

That is very sad to us.

The state park near Port St. Joe isn’t the only Florida park closed this year. Several parks haven't recovered in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael. We hope these parks quickly reopen.

If you have camped in a Florida State Park before, you know that you have to make your reservations about a year before you want to arrive there. When it was time to plan our Spring Break trip, we decided that we would take Rosie, our 25 foot Airstream trailer, to Big Lagoon State Park near Pensacola instead of Port St. Joe. Pensacola is a few hours closer to our home and we thought that it would be interesting to go somewhere different on what has become our "shake-down" camping trip for the year. We didn’t know how fortunate that decision was at the time.

Sign at entrance of Big Lagoon State Park

We reserved our site in Big Lagoon State Park for two weeks. It was a form of entertainment to watch our neighbors as they moved sites nearly every day. We found out that most of these people had reservations at one of Florida’s closed parks and had to scramble to replace those reservations with something else, a day or two at a time.

Rosie in our campsite at Big Lagoon

There is a variety of camping sites at Big Lagoon. Some sites have concrete pads while others are paved with soft beach sand. Most of the sites had some form of scrubs around them so that you didn't see your neighbors. We were fortunate in that we had a site with a concrete pad.

We kept hearing some of our fellow campers asking about what there was to do in this park. At first glance, it may appear that the options are limited, but this isn’t accurate. This is a park that you need to bring your bicycles and kayaks to. There are several trails that are great for bikes and the road in the campground area is paved. There are several lagoons and waterways that are fun for kayaks. To answer our neighbor's question, there are plenty of things to do in this park.

The lookout tower at Big Lagoon

View from the lookout tower

Walkway over the area next to the lagoon

Becky and Suzy on one of the hiking paths

An Osprey watches the nest

One of the bike/hiking paths we enjoyed included a small footbridge over a finger of the lagoon. We saw alligators there during a previous trip. We were happy to see a small alligator there this time.

A baby alligator and a turtle

Here are some specifics about this campground:

There are three camping loops in this park.
Our site had a concrete pad.
Our site had 30 and 20 amp electrical service. There are some 50 amp sites in this park.
Our site had a water connection. We noticed that the water filter in the kitchen sink needed to be replaced, but we left our spare at home. We were able to order a new one online and had it delivered to us in the park.
Our site did not have a sewer connection.
There was one dump station located at the entrance to the campground. It was common to see several campers waiting in line for their turns at the dump station.
There were three restrooms/showers in the camping areas. The one nearest us was exceptionally clean during our visit. (Thanks, volunteers!)
There was a camp store in the first loop. It never opened while we were there.
AT&T placed a strong 4G signal over our campsite for voice and data.
Similar to many state parks, Big Lagoon does not provide WiFi.
We were able to watch ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC and PBS TV stations using Rosie's antenna. We also received digital signals from GRIT, ME-TV and Comet. The signal strength would fluctuate during the day. We were glad we brought our over-the-air DVR from home loaded with episodes of shows we wanted to watch.

We were amazed at the number of Airstream units we saw while we were in this campground. During the two weeks we camped in Big Lagoon, we saw eight Airstream trailers, two Airstream motor homes and a Nest there.

It is a good thing that we have a “shake down” trip before we start our camping season. We discovered that we left some important things home. We updated our camping list and will be better prepared for our next trip.