Photo by James Fox-Smith

April 2011. An Empty Beach is a Good Beach: A long weekend with the wind in your hair, the waves in  your ears, and a seven-year-old to share it with.

Our camping trip to Florida didn’t get off to an auspicious start. It was raining lightly when we left St. Francisville, torrentially when we got to Hammond, and by the time we made the Mississippi state line there was enough water falling from the sky to bring Friday afternoon traffic on I-12 to a standstill. None of this was bothering my daughter and camping companion, Mathilde. Half-buried in pillows and sleeping bags in the back of the car, she seemed as oblivious to the ominous camping conditions outside, as she was to the ten-o-clock deadline on our arrival at Gulf Islands National Seashore, after which time the park gates would be closed for the night and we’d be sleeping on the roadside. While the prospect of spending the night in a compact car outside the gates of a national park gate may not have been an issue for seven-year-old, four-foot-long Mathilde, I wasn’t relishing it much.

But Mathilde and I had been looking forward to this adventure for weeks, so little things like torrential rain and a freezing forecast weren’t about to put a crimp in our plans. The idea was to spend a few days at Fort Pickens Campground in the Gulf Islands National Seashore, a longtime favorite escape for campers and RV-equipped snowbirds set amid dunes and scrubby live oaks at the western tip of Santa Rosa Island. Everyone knows that the beaches along this shimmering slip of a barrier island are beyond compare; that’s why Pensacola Beach and its summer hordes exist in the first place. But if the actual beach holds greater appeal for you than do high rises, sports bars and giant souvenir emporia, a turn down Fort Pickens Road is in order. There, for the price of an $8 National Park pass, you’ll find five miles of wild, empty, exquisitely beautiful Gulf coastline. For an additional $20 per night you can reserve a campsite at Fort Pickens Campground, that puts you within five minutes’ walk of Gulf beaches on one side, and Pensacola Bay on the other. This seemed as good a place as any in which to enjoy a rare, one-on-one adventure with my daughter. Mathilde’s mother and younger brother had gone on an excursion of their own that weekend, and as all parents of multiple children know, the dynamics are different when you get ‘em alone. So, with our car loaded with camping gear, fishing tackle, a kayak, beach games, a cooler full of hot dogs and assorted grilling paraphernalia, we drove on into the rain, in search of adventure.

The folks at the Pensacola Bay Area Convention & Visitors Bureau are in an enviable position. In addition to those extraordinary beaches they can also boast that Pensacola averages 340 days of sunshine a year. So the fact that we experienced three of the other days, complete with lashing rain, gale force winds driving surf and swarms of electric-blue jellyfish across the park access road, and temperatures in the low forties, made me and Mathilde feel special. Luckily, there are enough diversions in and around Pensacola to keep even the most beach-averse visitor creatively entertained for days on end. And without the inclement weather and the assistance of the folks at the CVB, we might never have discovered them.

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