Pelican Roost Campground at Naval Station Mayport in Jacksonville, FL
New State unlocked! We were super excited about entering Florida where we will be staying for the next few months. It is especially nice when we compare it to the weather back in Pennsylvania and Vermont.
This campground is directly on an inlet to the Atlantic Ocean. We saw big boats come through everyday. We saw a cruise ships, Navy ships, and massive cargo ships! In the mornings, we saw multiple bottlenose dolphins from our camper. Some long-termers even said they have seen saw sharks! The campground is called Pelican Roost and I thought that name was accurate because we saw hundreds of pelicans over the course of the week. We even saw Ospreys, a type of raptor bird, having fish in their talons! Up the road less than a quarter of a mile is a beach that we can ride our bikes too. We met another family there and it was fun to play catch and go to the beach and climb on the jetty rocks together. It was super nice to have some friends while we were there cause there usually isn’t many kids we can hang out with.
One of our big excursions was checking out the city of St. Augustine. Its claim to fame is being supposedly the oldest city in America, but our guide for the kayak tour said it is actually the oldest continually occupied settlement in America, but not the oldest. We did a kayaking trip on the Matanzas river through the mangroves. We saw fish and oyster fields. We stopped at an island on the river. I even planted some new mangroves! Our guide told us that for every mangrove it cleans the air for four people! Our guide reminded me of my teacher back in Vermont, because he was very informative and knew a lot about the wildlife there!(Shoutout to Ryan!) If any of you readers are in the St. Augustine area, I highly recommend kayaking with Ben of geotrippin.com!
I think a week there went fast, the campground was awesome and having friends there made it a whole lot more fun! Next stop Manatee cove family campground at Patrick space force base!
Current Leg: 181
Total miles: 2900