One of our favorite Gulf Coast places was St Joseph's Peninsular State Park. What you don’t see in earlier postings in this blog is that we camped there many years in tents before Rosie, our Airstream trailer. It was easier to wait out the occasional thunderstorms once we hung out our tent to dry and started camping in Rosie. We continued to camp there at least once every year. Looking at a map, St George Island is less than 50 miles to the east from Port St Joe. What kept us from St. George Island?
The easy answer was habit. We loved St. Joe Peninsular State Park and felt no need to explore other options.
Then Hurricane Michael destroyed St. Joseph Park along with its 119 camping sites. That gave us the needed motivation to visit other campgrounds along the Gulf Coast.
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| A stop at Mexico Beach on the way to St. George Island |
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| Sign at the entrance to the park |
But it wasn’t that easy. Getting reservations in any of Florida’s prime state park campgrounds has always been very difficult. I sometimes wonder if everyone else has an uncle in the state’s reservation office looking out for them. My wife has a bumper crop of uncles, but I doubt they have any pull when it comes to making camping reservations.
After looking for an opening a long time, we lucked into landing what had to be a cancellation and booked a week in St. George Island State Park. This gave us time to check out a “new to us” park and to see if it will be added to our list of “must revisit” campgrounds.
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| Rosie parked at the our campsite |
If you ever read reviews about this campground, a reoccurring theme is bugs. We understand why. Our site filled with very angry mosquitoes and noseeums most afternoons. We quickly learned that entering and leaving Rosie needed to be as fast as possible to limit the number of flying pests sneaking inside. Otherwise, we would spend the rest of the day trying to get rid of uninvited and unwanted guests inside Rosie.
The beach and the dunes have to be the main draw here. Locals call this the “forgotten coast.” While it is hardly forgotten, the uncrowded shoreline and lack of condos on the horizon was refreshing. Add in the amazing sand dunes in the park and you have a wonderful campground that lived up to its billing.
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| The coastline |
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| Sunrise at the park |
The beach was a short walk from the campground. It was refreshing to stroll down to the shore every day.
We noticed that the beach sand at this park was different from the sand we saw down the road at Port St Joe. The beach sand there was white and very soft. Beach sand at St. George Island had a slight reddish tint and was compacted down. It reminded us of Daytona Beach.
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| A shadow dance along the shore? |
There were several hiking trails in this park. We didn’t see any labeled as bike trails and joined in with the other bicyclers riding our bikes on the hiking trails. The downside was that we had to frequently push our bikes through patches of soft sand before we could ride them again.
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| Yes, this was a hiking and biking path! |
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| After a bike ride in the soft sand |
A campground brochure said there were just a few animals on the island because it was hard for them to get there. We think the raccoons seem to have found a way to the island because we found their sandy tracks on our truck. We also saw the alligator in the pond in front of the campground.
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| An alligator along the shore of a lake near the campground |
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| The bird was "on-duty" protecting the shoreline |
While the park didn’t have lots of wildlife, we did find a celebrity camping there. The Duke made sure no one was out-of-line in the park.
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| A first! John Wayne was in the campground |
We talked to the couple in an Airstream trailer parked across from us. We found out the wife grew up on the same street as Becky. What a small world!
This island must be a million miles away from an AT&T cell tower. Our phones showed a generous 1 bar of service. It took forever for our iPhones to connect to the Internet and text messages tended to fail.
Here are some specifics about this campground:
- There were two loops in the campground
- Our site was a back in
- Our site had some shade
- Most sites had some shrubbery to provide a small level of campground privacy between neighbors
- Our site was paved with dirt and was surprisingly level side-to-side
- Our site had 30 and 50 amp electrical service
- Our site had a water connection
- Our site did not have a sewer connection
- There was a dump station in this park. It was easy to pull our sewage tote to it
- It was an easy walk to take the trash to the dumpsters at the entrance of the campground
- There were two bathhouses in the campground. The one closest to our site appeared to be clean and maintained
- The park did not offer WiFi service
- AT&T provided maybe one bar of 5Ge voice and data service over our campsite. Our data usage was excessive while camping there and we did not stream video, hotspot, nor use data-hog apps. Our theory was that there were multiple errors in the received data on our phone because of the poor cell coverage and it had to be resent multiple times and that chewed up the data plan on our iPhones
- We were able to occasionally watch CBS, CW, FOX and NBC in the mornings and nights using Rosie’s TV antenna. The PBS station's signal was watchable most of the time. Digital channels occasionally seen were Bounce, Circle, Charge, Comet, Dabl, H&I, ION, ME-TV and MY-TV. Make sure you bring your DVDs to this campground
- There were restaurants and shopping nearby
- This was a pet friendly park
This campground will be remembered in family folklore as the flat tire and binoculars lens cap park. After going for years without a bike tire incident, we had two flats on our bicycles. Perhaps the abundance of sand spurs contributed to this problem. We found new bike tire tubes at a hardware store off the island.
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| We had to repair two flat tires on our bikes in the park |
We lost a lens cap on our binoculars while on a bike ride on the trail leading to the end of the island. After an afternoon of riding and walking our bikes through soft sand, we realized that we needed to head back to Rosie before darkness stranded us on the trail. Once back at our site, we discovered the lens cap was missing and any attempt to find it would have to wait until morning.
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| The bike path while searching for the lost lens cap |
I retraced our route the next morning looking for that lens cap. It was very windy that night blowing more soft sand on the path making it harder to travel and find it. I was thrilled when I found the wayward lens cap near where we turned around the previous day.
We took a side trip to St. Joseph Peninsula State Park. It remains a “day use” only park, but a ranger said progress is being made on reopening the campground. Yes, campground because the Gulf Breeze campground will be converted into a day use area. The Shady Pines campground will be reconfigured adding more space between sites and will be full hookups. Losing the Gulf Breeze loop means the number of sites available will shrink from 119 to about 60. The ranger’s estimate was that the campground could reopen as early as late fall 2022, but more realistically late spring or summer 2023.
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| Side trip to St Joseph Peninsular State Park |
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| You could see that the park was being worked on to fix the hurricane damage |
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| A picnic at the Marina |
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| The store was open |
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| Not much left of the trees in the park |
Our verdict is that St George Island State Park is a beautiful and quiet park. You need to arrive with all of the supplies and food you need because it is a long drive to a store. We enjoyed the park and hope to return.
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