Fort Pickens Campground … Our New Home

Thursday, 3 January
Fort Pickens Campground — Gulf Islands National Seashore (GINS), Florida
Temps: Lo 41F at Fort Pickens / Hi 50F in Quincy (5C / 10C)

Today was a travel day.  After another good night’s sleep at Beaver Lake Campground near Quincy, Florida, we woke up to a morning that started out with a temp of 50F (10C) — and light rain.  By the time we pulled out shortly before 9:00a, the temp was down to a damp and chilly 43F (6C).  It did go up from that low later in the day, but not by much.

We drove through light rain for a couple of hours, but by the time we stopped at the Okaloosa Rest Area for lunch, we were in the clear — from the rain, but not the overcast that dogged our path all the way to the Fort Pickens Campground in the Gulf Islands National Seashore.

An easy 182-mile (291 km) drive brings us to our new temporary home on the Gulf of Mexico.

Both the GPS and Streets & Trips routed us here via FL State Road 281 (toll of $11.25; worth it IMHO to stay out of Pensacola traffic) and US Route 98.  We also had a $1 toll to cross over to Santa Rosa Island, but we would have had to pay that anyway regardless of which way we came in.

Green marks our spot close to the tip of Santa Rosa Island.

Having passed into a new time zone, we gained an hour, arriving at Fort Pickens around 1:00p.  Another 30 minutes saw us settled into site A14 (with way too many bystanders coming out of their rigs to watch Mui back in; and one very helpful camper who gave him actual help negotiating a tight turn into the site).

Two things to watch out for when maneuvering into the site: branches in the open area across the road, and the position of the tree on the driver side of the site in relation to the slides.  Hugging the passenger side of the paved pad gave us plenty of room for the slides to open without any issues.

A14 is an electric and water site; no sewer hook-ups here.  It’s also fairly level — important to us since we continue to operate without levelers until we get to Red Bay next month.  The nightly rate of $20 is quite reasonable, we think.

Oh, and we’re conveniently situated across the road from the bathhouse, which we will be using to minimize the water going into our grey tank.  After all, it would be no fun to have to pick up stakes part way through our stay just to dump the tanks.  We successfully used this strategy during our stay at Hunting Island State Park in South Carolina last month.  If we can manage for 10 days, surely we can manage for 14 days, too.  The challenge is on ;-)

Since our site faces west, we will get advance warning of the colorful sunsets we’re hoping to see while we’re here.  In fact, the sun did break through the overcast today and we did have a very nice sunset.  We opted to enjoy it from home this time; next time, we’ll go to the beach.

After all that, I’m not sure if we will be in this site come tomorrow.  Just as we were about to sit down to dinner, the 50A electric pedestal went on the fritz.  The surge protector did its job and shut the system down.  Of course, our “roughing it not-so-smoothly” experience from a few years ago immediately sprang to our mind.  Luckily, this time we were awake to deal with it.  We reported the problem to the camp host; someone will look into it tomorrow morning.  In the meantime, we are hooked up to the pedestal for the neighboring site, which is empty tonight.  If the problem can’t be fixed, we may have to move.  Keeping fingers crossed.