St. George Island

Visiting St. George Island | January 2024

Would it surprise you if I said that today was really the only true ‘beach day’ for us out of a 2.5 week long road trip to the Gulf Coast? If you’re a longtime reader it probably wouldn’t, because we’ve mentioned plenty of times that we aren’t ‘beach people’. And yet today somehow ended up being one of our favorite days of this road trip. The main reason why is that warm and sunny days on the beach just hit different in January. This day also had all the the little details that make up a perfect beach day: perfect weather (warm but not hot for Charlotte’s sake), hardly any other people around, free all day parking close by, what more could we ask for?

But today we learned that there’s one thing we have now that makes beach days easy and enjoyable: our van! Because we had the van (which is also our home), we had everything we needed to enjoy the day without any prior planning, and all we had to do was walk between the beach, the nearby lot where the van was parked, and the lighthouse park in between the two.

Here’s how the day went: We woke up in Apalachicola National Forest and drove about 30 minutes to St. George Island. We parked, and Curtis took Charlotte for a short walk while I made breakfast and tea in the van. Then we walked on the beach together drinking our tea. The morning air was cool, so we grabbed jackets from the van before setting out. Curtis had a meeting that morning, so Charlotte and I continued our walk (not going far of course, just wherever the smells brought us) and eventually she found a place to sit and soak up the sun. Curtis finished his meeting, and we traded places so I could post on the blog. The day had warmed up, so we changed into short sleeves at the van. When lunch time rolled around, I went back to the van to gather some healthy snacks. Curtis spent most of the afternoon metal detecting while I either walked Char or sat with her and read. We decided to stick around until sunset, so an hour before that I went back to the van and made dinner to eat while we were waiting. By this point the heat of the day had passed, so the jackets came back out. We enjoyed the sunset, then said goodbye to the beach and this perfect day, then returned to the van and ended up driving back to the same spot we had enjoyed the night before.

We also enjoyed seeing another lighthouse today — the St. George Lighthouse. A fun fact that we learned is that it used to stand further South, out in the ocean on Little St. George Island. There was talk of trying to move it to preserve it, but it didn’t happen soon enough. In 2005, it completely collapsed into the ocean due to erosion. They saved as much of the original structure as they could, and the rebuilt lighthouse opened up in 2008.

One other detail that made today even easier to enjoy was that we knew our families were buried by 2′ of snow…sorry guys! I have to say, I don’t feel drawn to live in Florida by any means, but I definitely am drawn to places that start talking about windchill at 40 degrees and don’t reserve that kind of talk for single digits. I’m extremely grateful for our life and this opportunity to be a ‘van life snowbird’ and wouldn’t mind at all if we could continue running from the cold for years to come.