Dinata Misovec

We spent two nights in Milton, waiting for a vacancy in the state park.  I did several loads of laundry, cooked and cleaned, entered receipts in Quicken, etc., etc. We did not go anywhere.

We got underway this morning at 1007 and headed straight down to the coast and followed the beach to Topsail Hill Preserve State Park on Santa Rosa Island. Traffic was very heavy in Destin because they were having their seafood festival this weekend. We got to the state park about 1145 after driving 38 miles.

The park is beautiful. Here is Sao in our site.

And, this is the view out our front window:

The park has a tram that takes people from the parking lot at the entrance, and campers from the campground to the beach.  No vehicles are allowed down the road to the beach.  We decided to walk to the beach to get our exercise. It goes through a pine scrub forest. Most people here brought their bikes to get to and from the beach. I couldn’t tell from the campground map how far it would be.

You know how it always seems longer going somewhere new than it does coming back? This road seemed forever.

And then, when we would turn a bend, there would be more curves in the road ahead. It was a pretty walk though.

When we finally got to the boardwalk to the beach, my pedometer said we only walked 1.3 miles. Then, we crossed the dunes on an extra-long boardwalk. This is not half of it.

There were only a few people on the beach, mostly close to the boardwalk. The sand is very white and we even got a little streak of blue sky. We took a walk on the beach.  There are high rise building at each end of the park.

Here is Andy in his natural habitat.

Someone lost their beach ball up in the dunes, but honored the “Do Not Walk on Dunes” signs and left it there.

We met two little crabs on the beach.  They were just about invisible in the white sand. Andy calls them ghost crabs.

After we got back to the beach entrance, Andy saw this bench and decided to sit a spell. I enjoyed listening to the two girls talking on the next bench. They were about 10, 11, 12, or 13. The younger one said, “It annoys me that we have to go to school.  Why can’t we just be born smart?

The bench was so tall that our feet did not touch the sand.  I suppose some sand has been washed away.

I studied the vines creeping across the sand. I thought they had a lot of yellow flowers on them.

But, on closer inspection, I realized that they were leaves.

Then I found some flowers.  They are called Beach Morning Glories or Railroad Vine.

The streak of blue sky closed up while we sat on the bench. Then it turned cooler, so we decided to walk back home.

There were a lot of these things along the road, in large patches.

I picked two up that were not attached to the ground.  I didn’t think to look up to see if they had fallen from the trees. They are hard, but not brittle.  A Google search did not turn them up.

 

There were a number of new-to-me plants along the road.  Here are two.