Romney Marsh, an hour away - a hundred-square-mile marsh, know the paths...


One of the Marsh Churches, St.Thomas Becket, Fairfield, get the key from a nail on the wall of a nearby house...


the 18thC interior... superb... a place to sit and think... UB

My favorite place these days is Alligator Point, Florida. My wife, dogs, and I have spent a week's vacation there 2 of the last 5 years (the others were spent at Cape San Blas, Bellair Beach, and Carrabelle Beach).

Alligator Point is on the panhandle and is the least developed beach I have seen in FL. There is nothing like it that I can find. First, it is pet friendly. Second, it is often desolate.

I first learned of Alligator Point by stumbling on this web site:

http://www.alligatorpoint.org/about/KatesDream.html

I never got to stay in that house because they were not renting it when I discovered AP. But, reading their site beckoned me to visit the area.

Here's a web cam from the area showing the bay side of the peninsula:

http://www.beachview.com/agpt640.htm

Here's where it is geographically located:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=29.9 ... 3&t=h&z=13

The entire peninsula is AP. Zoom out to get some context as to where it is in FL.

To give you an idea, the first year we went, we stayed in a house that was literally 30 feet from the water:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=29.8 ... 9&t=h&z=18

We could walk down our steps and be at the water.



That week we saw about a dozen people total on the beach...the entire week. That was in early October though, just past the tourist season. But, it was still warm enough to go in the ocean with no problem. Two of those people we saw were in the water with dolphins swimming by. I would estimate the dolphins to have been within 10 feet of the people. It is not uncommon to see dolphins at AP.

If you go to AP, go for the beach. There is no other reason to go. There are no condos (actually, there is 1 on the entire peninsula), the only restaurant on the peninsula was the KOA Campground office that sold fried chicken, but it was destroyed by Hurricane Dennis a couple years back and the entire campground is now gone. There are several restaurants in the area, but it's not uncommon for us to travel 20 miles to eat there.

This last October, we stayed here:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=29.9 ... 9&t=h&z=18

It's the house by iteself beyond the end of the road. This location was great for us with the dogs. There is no house north because it is state park. The nearest house south is about 300 feet, and no one was there. We were able to just let the dogs run free on the beach. The coolest part for me was that when the water was down, there were sand dollars everywhere. Probably hundreds of them. I had never seen a real sand dollar in the wild before that was bigger than a nickel. But here, they were plentiful and ranged from 2-3 inches in diameter. At first we started collecting them. Since I had never seen them, nor had my wife seen them in such abundance, we started picking them up. After about 30, when you start getting picky saying "that one's only 2.5 inches, skip it", you start to realize there is no point. You just can't get them all. We brought back about a dozen of the best ones. But I kid you not, there were hundreds.

Here are some pics I found:

Daz wrote:Joe that sounds like a fantastic place but can you tell me, what are sand dollars, and did you see any alligators?

Here is a sand dollar:



That one is a dead one. They start as living creatures, but when they are alive, they are green and have these little hairlike spines. When they are dead, they are more white or gray and feel a bit like plaster.

No, I have never seen an alligator there. Supposedly, there are no alligators there. It got its name from the fact that the peninsula looks like an alligator's tail.

That Alligator Point looks my sort of place, I sometimes like to get away from lots of people. However, sometimes I like to play with machinery more on the big size, a few minutes from where I live, the famous Bluebell Railway. These guys service with BIG spanners!



Boys' toys, but superb open air museum as well, and lovely people to talk to... (and the best steak and kidney pie in the county...) UB