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.
Rain or shine, no trip to Pensacola is really complete without a visit to the National Naval Aviation Museum. Housed at the Pensacola Naval Complex, the museum traces a century of naval aviation in some 150 superbly restored aircraft and four thousand artifacts on display. The first plane to cross the Atlantic is here, as is the first to land at the North Pole. There are jets, prop planes and bombers representing the airborne histories of the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. The famous Blue Angels weren’t flying the weekend we were there, but the museum sports an entire wing of Angels planes suspended from the ceiling, and there are several that kids get to climb in and out of to get a feel of being at the controls themselves. We enjoyed the museum’s dramatically impressive IMAX cinema, which offers stomach-lurching pilot’s-eye views of various kinds, and the Cubi-Bar Café—a recreation of the famous Cubi-Point Officers’ Club in the Phillipines and an exhibit in its own right. Free admission.
Having driven out to the Pensacola Naval Complex, the Pensacola Lighthouse and Museum provided an excellent vantage point from which to contemplate the weather conditions. Built in 1859 and standing on a bluff overlooking Pensacola Bay, the lighthouse’s twenty-second flash still guides ships negotiating the bay’s entrance at night. Leave your flip flops at the bottom for the 177-step climb up the sinuous wrought iron spiral staircase to the light room above. The view, (and the opportunity to send your wife photos of your daughter clinging to a tiny balcony 190 feet in the air), make the climb completely worthwhile. And if you happen to be aloft when the Blue Angels take off from the Naval base across the road, well, aren’t you the lucky one?
Downtown Pensacola was filling up for its big annual Mardi Gras parade the day we were in town. With a colonial history that stretches back more than four hundred years, Pensacola has a firm claim on Mardi Gras, and has been celebrating it since 1874, which makes Pensacola Mardi Gras one of the oldest in the country. But since it was beginning to rain again, and we get plenty of beads at home, Mathilde and I elected to consider the area’s early history from the relative safety of the T. T. Wentworth Jr. Florida State Museum, in Pensacola’s former city hall building. The museum houses exhibits tracing the history of colonial Pensacola, from the lives of the area’s Native American inhabitants to the shipwreck of Spanish explorer Don Tristan de Luna, who established an ill-fated Spanish outpost here at the astonishingly early date of 1559, which enables Pensacola to claim the title of the oldest European settlement in mainland America. Pleasantly eclectic, the museum also has galleries devoted to the development of African American journalism locally and nationally, Pensacolians’ contributions in the Civil War, and the evolution of swimsuits over the past century. Mathilde’s favorite was the third floor’s Discovery Gallery, where small visitors get to sail a model Spanish galleon, set up a colonial-era store, trade furs and construct a Native American campsite. Admission is free. historicpensacola.org has information on this and a series of other historic attractions including Historic Pensacola Village, the Pensacola Historical Museum and the Arcadia Mill Archaeological Site.
Indeed if history is your thing, the Pensacola area really does have plenty to go around. Testament to the strategic importance of Pensacola Bay and the Navy yard within is to be found in the huge installations of Fort Pickens and Fort Barrancas, squaring off against one another across the narrow mouth of the bay itself. Pensacola’s location—south of young America’s British colonies and at the dividing line where Spanish Florida met French Louisiana—made these contested waters, over which Spanish, French, British, Confederate and American flags all flew at one time or another. Named for Revolutionary War hero Andrew Pickens and completed primarily using slave labor by 1834, Fort Pickens was originally conceived as a coastal defense guarding the entrance to the bay. But it was during the Civil War, when its location at the western tip of slender Santa Rosa Island made it practically indomitable, that it became famous as one of the few forts in the south never captured by Confederate forces. Today, its easy to lose hours roaming the cavernous fortifications, parade grounds, cannon batteries, tunnels and powder magazines here, whose impassive presence illustrates the determination of a young republic to insure its defense in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. Mathilde especially enjoyed roaming the site’s subterranean tunnels and powder chambers, some of which housed Apache prisoners, including the famous chief Geronimo, in 1886. There’s a fishing pier here, and small museum/store, too. Free with park admission.
But back to the park itself. A dramatic illustration of the preservative value of America’s National Park system awaits halfway along Fort Pickens Road. With the high rise hotels and apartment blocks of Gulf Breeze suddenly behind you, there are only white dunes, waving sea oats, open ocean and those blinding white beaches ahead. This is Gulf Islands National Seashore, and for lovers of ocean-side environments, the remaining slender ribbon of island presents a truly enchanted landscape in which to walk, swim, canoe, fish, snorkel, birdwatch, or just sit on the beach and listen to the waves. As for the accommodations, Fort Pickens offers a pretty comfortable place to set up camp for a few days—provided you don’t have to do it at ten-o-clock at night, in a thunderstorm. Two hundred campsites are scattered around three blacktop loops; each has its own parking pad, running water, electrical outlets, firepits; and nice, sandy soil for whacking tent pegs into. There were bathroom/shower blocks at convenient intervals, and a little park store was close by and amply equipped with all the things inexperienced campers tend to leave home without. It was friendly, well-tended and about as comfortable as a campsite can be—a fact attested to by the semi-permanent village of RVs sporting Wisconsin or Michigan license plates, and outfitted with everything from mailboxes and twinkly holiday lights, to homey touches like garden gnomes and “Welcome to the Andersons” yard signs. At $20 per night, Fort Pickens Campground made a marvelous base from which to explore the cultural and historical pleasures of Pensacola. And once we had had our fill of museums, souvenir shops and the cheerful din of famous dining hotspots like Native Café (excellent breakfasts) and Peg Leg Pete’s (great food and fun at any age), it was a tranquil, beautiful spot to retreat to as well.
On day three of our visit that famous Panhandle sunshine finally returned, and Mathilde and I got to do what most people come here to do: We went to the beach. We kayaked, collected shells, built sandcastles, poked dead jellyfish, spotted ospreys nesting, and even braved the winter water briefly. And although a stiff north wind kept the air cool, finding a bit of gorgeous, empty seashore and a sunny spot in the lee of a sand dune from which to admire it, was the easiest thing in the world. Yes, we’ll be back to Fort Pickens for sure. Because even with rain and the winter gales to contend with, the potential here is just so easy to see. Just add good weather.
Details • details • Details
Pensacola Bay Area Convention & Visitors Bureau
1401 East Gregory Street
Pensacola, Fl
(800) 874-1234 • visitpensacola.com
Gulf Islands National Seashore Fort Pickens Road, Pensacola Beach, Fl Information: (850) 934-2622 • nps.gov Reservations: (877) 444-6777 or recreation.gov National Naval Aviation Museum 1750 Radford Boulevard Naval Air Station, Pensacola, Fl (850) 452-3604 navalaviationmuseum.org Pensacola Lighthouse 2081 Radford Boulevard Pensacola, Fl (850) 393-1561 • pensacolalighthouse.org T. T. Wentworth Jr. Florida State Museum 330 South Jefferson Street Pensacola, Fl (850) 595-5990 • historicpensacola.org Peg Leg Pete’s 1010 Fort Pickens Road Gulf Breeze, Fl (850) 932-4139 • peglegpetes.com Native Café 45A Via De Luna Drive Gulf Breeze, Fl (850) 934-4848
