#state-park
4 posts tagged.
Anastasia Salt Run — A Kayak Loop Five Minutes from St Augustine's Tourist Crush
St Augustine gets four million visitors a year. Almost none of them know that on the bay side of Anastasia State Park there's a sheltered tidal estuary, three miles of kayak loop through mangrove edges, where you'll see jumping mullet, the occasional dolphin, and zero tour buses.
Bahia Honda — The Best Beach in the Florida Keys (Yes, Better Than the Famous Ones)
Mile marker 37, between Marathon and Big Pine Key. A state park with two beaches that consistently get rated among the best in the U.S., a destroyed 1912 railroad bridge you can hike, and snorkel reef that's accessible from shore. Most Keys traffic drives past.
Bill Baggs Cape Florida — Miami's Best Snorkel Beach Is the One Locals Use
Fifteen minutes from downtown Miami, at the tip of Key Biscayne, there's a state park with a 200-year-old lighthouse, a mile of shaded beach, and a limestone rip-rap that's the most underrated shore-snorkel spot in South Florida. Tourists drive past it to get to South Beach. Don't be them.
Hontoon Island — The State Park You Reach via Free Passenger Ferry on the St Johns
Forty minutes from Orlando there's a state park you can't drive to. A free passenger ferry takes you across the St Johns River to 1,650 acres of bottomland hardwood, primitive cabins, and a 1955 archaeological dig that uncovered a six-foot Native American owl totem. Most Floridians don't know it exists.