Topsail Hill / Florida Caverns

Topasail Hill Preserve State Park 7/1 - 7/7
Florida Caverns State Park 7/7-7/9

We just returned from our summer July 4th vacation.  This time we opted to go to the Panhandle and visit our absolutely favorite beach - Topsail Hill.

This beach is really nice, it is not crowded and natural.  You cannot access this beach unless you ride our bike or take the tram that the state park provides.  That does make it nice but also makes it a bit challenging to get all your gear and supplies for the day down to the beach area.

Waves this week were just so so.  Enough to do some boogie boarding on.  My oldest enjoyed many times out on the SUP.  At times it was calm and other times it was choppy.  She was able to see giant sting rays, sharks, all kinds of fish and dolphins. One day, a shark swam right in front of our youngest daughter.  It happened so fast, all I had time to do was yell for her to look out.  The shark kept swimming and never messed with her.

The campground has some improvements where they are replacing a few busted concrete pads with gravel sites.  Our site was very busted up and we did have to be careful not to trip over the crumbling concrete.  But they did remove the wifi at the laundry room.  So the only way to get wifi was to go to the camp store.  At least they didn't turn it off after they left though.

We spent one day going to the NAS Pensacola Naval Aviation museum.  Always a nice time and the kids enjoy it very much.

Traffic was awful, especially in Destin.  So we didn't venture much away from Topsail.  We did opt to see fireworks at the Sandestin Resort's Village Warf.  Fireworks were great but crowd control was terrible.  They were not able to get shuttles back to us and it caused people to get very upset to where they had to call the police. We ended up walking back to our truck parked about 1.5 miles away.

We left Friday and headed over the Florida Caverns State Park.  The campground was just soso.  Sites were wide but not deep.  The caverns tour was gorgeous!  We loved loved loved the tour.  It was worth it for sure!  The campground lost power after a small storm and we were without power for a good hour.  Thankfully it came back on before the camper got too hot!  We ended up leaving around 6pm Saturday to head home.  Our oldest was scheduled to work Shark Con with the Florida Aquarium so we needed to get back. I was worried we wouldn't have enough time if we left Sunday morning.

Overall a great vacation and we always look forward to going back to Topsail!
 Blue Angels at Naval Aviation Museum

Florida Caverns

 Sunset at Topsail

Fireworks at Red White Baytowne at the Warf in Sandestin Resort


More Museum Pictures at Pensacola NAS

Caverns



This is the cart my husband made to haul all our stuff to the beach. 




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