Cozy Rosie: Fort Pickens Campground - Pensacola, Florida ( April 2019)

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Fort Pickens Campground - Pensacola, Florida ( April 2019)

We both grew up in Florida near the beach. Driving on roads with a little wind-blown beach sand on them is very nostalgic to us. Driving on roads with the beach on one side and a bay or lagoon on the other stirs up familiar and happy feelings from our childhoods. We love Florida's beaches and the roads leading to them.

The Pensacola Beach sign at night

The road with a little sand on it

It is always interesting to read reviews on AllStays, RV Parky and Campendium left by other campers Some people complain about beach sand being blown on the access road to Fort Pickens Campground. I'm not sure what their expectations are from a campground at a beach, but I am willing to bet they are very different from ours. Very different!

It felt great driving to our campsite on a road that had some beach sand on it. We also enjoyed seeing the beach on one side of the road and the bay on the other. I think most campers with beach reservations are equally happy to see the tell tale signs of the coast.

The sign at the park's entrance

There was a potential problem when we arrived at our site. It was designed for trailers with doors in the front. Rosie has a rear door. (Rosie is our 25 foot Airstream trailer.) If we parked where the campground designer wanted us, we would only have a few inches to step on before a steep dropoff from the asphalt pad. The potential for an ankle injury was high.

The solution was easy. We needed to park as close to the edge as possible so that Rosie’s door steps hung over the dirt on the side of the asphalt pad.

The solution to Rosie's step problem

Once the parking problem was solved, it was time to enjoy the park. It’s a good thing that there are many ways to enjoy this campground. One example is the “Blues,” short for the Navy’s Blue Angels.

We were wondering if the Blue Angels were at their home base, Pensacola’s Naval Air Station. The answer came to us in a roar our second morning. You get used to hearing military jets overhead in this park since all Navy and Marine pilots train across the Bay at the Navy base. You cannot mistake the intensity of the jet engines when the “Blues” are screaming over Rosie. It is a thrilling sight to see some of the best Navy and Marine pilots practice their skills as they fly over the park.

The "Blues" flying over Fort Pickens

Things took a serious turn on our third day. The weather forecast called for severe thunderstorms, driving rain, strong winds and an elevated threat of tornadoes after dark and until about 2 a.m. People camping in tents packed up and headed to hotels for the night. The RV and motor home campers secured or packed up everything outside before retreating inside to ride out the storm.

Well, almost everyone. One of our campsite neighbors, the one with every camping gadget imaginable under their outside canopy, skipped the storm preparation task.

As predicted, the storm woke us up several times during the night. It was entertaining during those times to look out Rosie’s window to see by the light of lightening flashes what things had blown away from our neighbor’s site.

Speaking of the storm, I was very grateful we moved closer to the edge of our site’s asphalt pad when we first arrived. A tree branch ran parallel to Rosie’s side. It was about six inches away from Rosie at first then about two feet away after we moved. During the worst of the storm, I estimated that the branch was swaying about ten inches and would have smashed into Rosie had we not moved.

The tree on the side of the Rosie

Rosie in the campground

Temperatures turned cooler after the storm. I guess our reward for riding out the storm was perfect camping weather.

One visitor said that a park census found that more than 150 osprey nests were currently “active” in the park. That was easy to believe. We saw nests and adult birds attending to their chicks all over the park.

An Osprey enjoying his fresh fish dinner

A bald eagle family was also residing in the park. We may have been the only family that didn’t get a photo of the juvenile eagle flying around the campground.

There are some good bicycle trails in this park. We also noticed several people brought their canoes and kayaks, but we could not figure out where they launched them.

One of the bike/foot trails includes a nice footbridge over a pond that is home to several large turtles. We always enjoyed looking for the big “granddaddy” turtle.

A turtle in the pond

Here are some specifics about this campground:

You have to use Reserve America to book a site in this park. It always amazes me how Reserve America keeps finding new ways to make booking a campsite more difficult.
There are five camping loops in this park. Loop A is separate from the remaining loops, which all run together in one large field.
Our site had 20, 30 and 50 amp electrical service
Our site had a water connection with good pressure
Our site did not have a sewer connection
There are two dump stations in the park. The first serves Loop A and the second is for the remaining loops. This means that you will probably be in a line to use the dump station.
Our site had an asphalt pad. We had to use one leveling pad to correct a slight lean to the left.
Our pad was very narrow. To avoid a situation where we could accidentally twist an ankle exiting Rosie, we parked as close to the edge of the pad as possible.
There are multiple bathhouses throughout the park. They all seemed to be the stereotypical federal bathhouses in that they are cinderblock and concrete structures painted shades of gray.
Water temperature and pressure in the showers were pleasant surprises. There was hot water and strong pressure.
We had only one bar of AT&T 4G voice and data service. We had to drive to the fishing pier several times to do something online.
We may have made a discovery about our TV system. FOX was the only station that occasionally drifted in enough for us to watch. We mentioned this to several neighbors who said they were receiving more than a dozen stations. We will check the performance of our amplifier and TV antenna when we return home.

Similar to our last campground, we noticed several people packing up and switching sites every morning. Some Florida State Parks remain closed or continue being used as staging grounds for reconstruction after Hurricane Michael last year. This resulted in hundreds of campsites closing along the Gulf Coast and has people scrambling to get reservations somewhere else. If you’ve ever tried to get reservations in a Florida State Park, it is even more difficult now.

We did notice an odd situation while camping at Fort Pickens. We went out to dinner one evening and returned after the park’s entrance station closed. We drove up to the keypad where you enter the secret code to open the gate. Next to the code on the back of the car pass was a request that you stop once entering the park to block the road until the gate closes, which we did. A car quickly came up behind us then turned around when it was apparent that we were not letting anyone piggyback in. Maybe “stealth” camping is a problem there.