Fort Desoto Park, FL

Well, we are finally on the road again. Home repairs and dental work messed up the travel budget over the summer. That may have been just as well considering the price of fuel over that period, but we would have liked to get a few motorhome trips in.

We are taking a quick trip to Fort Desoto Park in Pinellas County. This is one of our favorite parks. The camping spaces are separated by foliage ye open up on water so you have privacy and a view. The staff keeps everything maintained very well, too. This is definitely a park to visit if you are in the St. Petersburg area. Entrance to the park and its highly rated beach used to be just 50 cents, but recently they have started charging $5.00 per car. If you are camping here that daily charge is included in your camping fee. I think the $5 charge is certainly still a bargain. This is a large park with several miles of wonderful beach and there is a boat ramp for access to the Tampa Bay and Gulf for fishing. The park is on Mullet Key, but the waters surrounding the park are filled with smaller keys so that it is a terrific place for kayaking.

We are here to see how Nia (our rescue Golden Retriever) deals with being on the road in the motorhome and, more importantly, how she deals with the other dogs in the campground. Nia has issues with other dogs because neighbor dogs attacked her when she was younger. Fort Desoto places all campers with pets in a separate area. This places more dogs in a close area than would be experienced in other parks. If she can handle things here she will be OK elsewhere.

Once we got the coach set up we took Nia to the shore. There is a dog beach here, but she would go nuts with the other dogs so we found a quite area where we could walk her near, but not on, the beach. Barbara took this opportunity to look for shells and beach glass. While there we found two sailboats anchored close-in in the lee of Mullet Key to ride out the high winds we are experiencing this week. 

While we have not gotten a direct hit from hurricane Sandy, we have had a good bit of wind for several days now. With the lower humidity, these winds have created a severe fire situation. Crazy, the northeast is getting a deluge and the southeast is holding its breath in hopes that wildfires will not break out.

After our outing I fired up the grill for sausages and peppers for dinner. Fantastic!

We finished the evening with the girls watching DWTS. Can’t miss that, even on the road.