Camping 30A State Park Style
If you’re a seasoned camper, you know that fall and winter is the best time to visit and stay comfortably without the oppressive heat. If you’re a first-time camper, camping is a unique way to experience the area and there are many different types of camping. From roughing it old school on a primitive tent site to glamping with your own AC unit or loading up the RV with all your favorite creature comforts. Here we recommend camping along Scenic Route 30As award-winning Florida State Parks.
Florida State Parks on Scenic Route 30A offers some of the most beautiful areas in the U.S. to set up camp, alongside rare coastal dune lakes, award-winning beaches, breathtaking scenery and the emerald waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
If you’re a seasoned camper, you know that fall and winter is the best time to visit and stay comfortably without the oppressive heat. If you’re a first-time camper, camping is a unique way to experience the area and there are many different types of camping. From roughing it old school on a primitive tent site to glamping with your own AC unit or loading up the RV with all your favorite creature comforts. Here we recommend camping along Scenic Route 30As award-winning Florida State Parks. But stay tuned for a December post where we will explore a few other ways you can pitch your tent under the beautiful Gulf Coast sky! (Think Glamping and Beach Camping!)
Grayton Beach State Park
Grayton Beach State Park is one of the Gulf’s most beautiful places to set up camp. It boasts one mile of sugar-white sand fronting the emerald waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and includes Western Lake, a rare coastal dune lake found in only a few locations worldwide. At this Florida State Park, you can find convenient campgrounds for RV and tent camping. Once you’re set up, this park offers some of the best hiking, and biking, kayaking and fishing in the Gulf. A convenient boat ramp allows visitors to go paddling and kayaking in the brackish waters, while anglers can try their luck in both fresh and saltwater, and the nature trails are a mixed marvel of massive sand dunes, salt marshes, and a thick coastal forest of magnolias, scrub oaks, and pine flatwoods, teeming with birds and other wildlife.
Point Washington State Park
For the tried and true camper, Point Washington State Park offers eight primitive overnight camping sites on its Easter Lake Campgrounds, located off Forest Road 7, in on the southeast corner of the Choctawhatchee Bay. The park is made up of 10 natural communities where you can explore the natural terrains that define the beauty of the Gulf such as its sandhills, basin swamps, wet flatwoods, wet prairie and cypress swamps. Be on the lookout for some of the rare and endangered species that inhabit this magical forest. It’s home to the American kestrel, the gopher tortoise, the flatwoods salamander, the white-topped pitched plant, and the world’s largest population of Curtiss sandgrass.
Topsail Hill Preserve State Park
With one of America’s most beautiful sweeps of beach and an all-round breath-taking scenery, Topsail Hill Preserve State Park is considered one of the best natural parks in the United States. It’s also home to one of the top-ranked RV and cabin rental parks in the nation. They have 156 campsites, accommodating every type of camper, from trailers to RVs to tent camping as well 16 bungalows and 16 cabins available to rent. Named after its 25-foot sand dunes, the park offers campers and all visitors alike a wide range of natural resources and recreational activities all year-round. The park has about 13 miles of trails with different surfaces, ranging from gravel and flat pavements to deep sand and rocky roads, for all kinds of sporting activities like biking, hiking, and horseback riding.
Henderson Beach State Park
This park, located in on Emerald Coast Parkway, in Destin, is a perfect camping on the Gulf destination. It’s here where you marvel at its majestic shoreline anchored by 30-foot, snow-white sand dunes, swim in warm gulf waters, and meander on the nature trail bordered by ancient but still growing and shifting dunes with vegetation known as coastal scrub. Their 60 campsites are connected to the beach via boardwalk. This beautifully-maintained park was established for the preservation and protection of the area’s natural features and public enjoyment, the last remaining coastal scrub area in Destin.
RV Camping
If the sound of ‘camp resort’ appeals more to you than ‘tent camping’, then Scenic Route 30A offers you a number of highly-rated resorts where you can park your RV. The best place to start your search is in and around the beautiful towns of Miramar Beach and Santa Rosa Beach. With over 30 such resorts, you can choose from a variety of locations and amenities that suit your RV camping needs and desires. Some of the above-listed state parks also accommodate RV parking with a mixture of back-in and pull-through sites but check each park’s list of amenities, hook-ups and waste disposal.
Happy Camping!