Port St Joe State Park

A map to give you an idea of where this park is along the pan handle (out on the peninsula, not the highlighted area):

We arrived at the park late at night.  Suze had called ahead to get the code for the gate.  Try finding a campsite in the pitch black when you've never been to a campground before and your towing a 35' trailer behind you.  Lesson learned is to have the map of the park before you arrive at night.

The beaches here are beautiful too (even when the red flags are flying):

Not too many people on the beaches as you can see.  The park is on a 10-12 mile long peninsula.  Less than 100 yards between the bay and the gulf in some places.  We have a nice campsite with the Gulf out the front:

And a nice view of the wetlands that lead to the bay out the back:

There are some bike trails and more hiking trails here.  Almost every time we were out, we'd run into wildlife (mostly Bambie):

This picture is a little fuzzy but look at our welcome to this nature trail . . .

The park doesn't get very good TV (air) or Cell reception so we went on the hunt Sunday and found a great sports bar called Toucan's on Mexico City Beach about 30 miles away to watch yet another Patriots win against the Colts this time!  8-2!

Another day we drove to Apalachicola and St George State Park about an hour away.  The park was pretty much a barrier island.  Beaches were nice but not much else to offer in the area - wouldn't make the trip out of our way to camp here but nice if you're in the area.

One day while in Port St Joe shopping, we went into a sports store there.  They had an inflatable kayak (2 up) there that had our names all over it.  After doing some research on the web, we decided to buy it:

Check out the clear bottom panels for underwater viewing.  Later that afternoon we were out in the bay kayaking.  We witnessed hundreds of fish (10-12 inches long) jumping out of the water all around us for a good 20 mins.  Unfortunately the portable camera I had with us took a dive as I was trying to capture the moment.  We sat there anyway waiting for one to jump into the kayak - no fish for dinner tonight.  We also saw lots of other fish, tiny crabs, horseshoe crabs, scallops, oysters, puffer fish, and many different birds diving for food.

Many days we'd go walking the beach or down by the marina in the bay and we'd see dolphins herding up schools of fish for dinner:

Thanksgiving we went for a walk on the beach.  We witnessed a rare single clawed writing crab.  Only a few people have been able to sneak up on one and see it write in the sand:

We continued to watch in amazement and thought we'd found our 1st Republican crab:

But as we continued to watch this guy, we realized he was trying to tell us to get to Toucan's again to watch the Patriots beat up on the Lions!

The hiking here was different in that most of the trails were all soft sand.  Made for slow and difficult hikes:

Trail heads from the beaches up and over the large dunes:

And almost every hike we spotted one of these guys:

Check out the bay in the background on this one:

And here's a doe with fawn:

The day after Thanksgiving, the creatures started decorating the trees out back for the holidays:

Another evening we caught a beautiful moon rising . . .

And what would another blog posting be without at least 1 sunset out our front yard:

So tomorrow (Monday) we're off early and back to Panama City to have follow-up work done on our tin can and then back to Grayton Beach State Park for a few days before moving down the road to TopSail State Park.