St George Island State Park

So after we shared our adventure at the highly recommended St. Joseph Peninsula State Park, a bunch of people commented that St. George Island was even nicer. Even nicer! How is that possible? Actually, St. George Island was already on my radar after reading about it on Laurel’s fabulous blog, Raven & Chickadee last spring. Since then I’ve been scheming to get us there.  The problem is, much like St. Joseph, this park is on a pretty remote barrier island with questionable cell service. Hence the decision to only stay a single weekend night. As is turns out the cell service was actually quite good. Although we only got 1 bar of both AT&T & Verizon, it was a surprisingly strong LTE signal that would have been fine for working purposes. Unfortunately, we have run out of time here in the panhandle and must be moving on into the middle of the state. Next time we will definitely stay longer.

Perfect in every way!

But wait! Before I tell you more about St. George I have to mention the cute, historic town of Apalachicola where we stopped briefly on our way to the island. It was a spur of the moment decision to stop, prompted by the charming downtown full of cute stores and restaurants housed in historic buildings.

The charming town of Apalachicola

Before you even ask, no we did not eat any oysters. According to Wikipedia, more than 90% of Florida’s oyster production is harvested from Apalachicola Bay. So if you like oysters this is the place to visit. We, however, do not like oysters. In fact, neither of us eat much shellfish at all, and I personally find everything about oysters to be incredibly unappealing (I mean have you seen what they look like). We did find a small cafe serving something other than oysters though, and snagged a seat at the bar where we chowed down on some very tasty fresh grouper tacos.

Mmmm…fish tacos

It’s only a short drive from Apalachicola to St. George Island across a series of long bridges.

Across the bridge

The state park is at the far eastern end of the island. We checked in, set up for the night and headed down to the beach. Since we were only staying one night we didn’t even bother to unhook. The campground has a nice feel with good size sites and a decent amount of trees in between for privacy. Our site was fine, but next time I would try to get site 30, 31, or 33 at the back of the campground with lots of trees and plenty of space to spread out.

Our home for the night – site 20

The beach was maybe a half mile away and completely deserted. We took advantage of the extra hour of light (yay for the eastern time zone) and walked for a few miles in each direction before sunset.

Evening at the beach

The next day we spent a few hours on the beach before check out. Once again, there was no one else in sight and we plopped our chairs in a prime spot right next to the water.

Miles and miles of prefect beach all to ourselves

It’s too bad the temps were only in the 60s because that water was looking mighty inviting.

Perfect for swimming

As for all those people who told us St. George was better than St. Joseph, you might be on to something. If you factor in both the beach and the campground, St. George definitely wins, but based on the beach alone I would say they are equally wonderful. I guess if I had to choose I would return to St. George over St. Joseph because I liked the camp sites better. Also, I would love to spend more time exploring the rest of the island and take a longer tour through Apalachicola.

One final Panhandle sunset

And with that we wrap up our time in the Florida Panhandle. It has been a pretty great three weeks full of gorgeous beaches, really nice campgrounds, some fun meet-ups with other RVers, and even a family holiday. It’s easy to understand why this part of Florida is such a popular vacation destination. At this time of year the weather was a little bit on the chilly side with some fairly cold temperatures, but we liked being here during the off season when the campgrounds are only half full and the beaches nearly deserted.

So what’s next? We head south into central Florida for some warmer temperatures and Christmas at Grandma’s house. The adventure continues…