St Pete Beach

We had a great beach vacation.    We went to St Pete Beach, FL (near St Petersburg and Tampa).  Whenever we plan a vacation we have to decide if we want to explore a new city and see the sights or just relax, and this year (like last year) going somewhere to relax was what we wanted and this was just what we needed!

We did work in some adventure because we decided to drive rather than fly. I won’t lie; it was a long drive (18-19 hours each way) but a fun one.   Kevin loaded up his iPod with music and we had a cooler with drinks and a few snacks and didn’t worry about how much stuff we were bringing since we didn’t have to get it into carry-on or checkable luggage.   We both enjoyed getting to see part of the country neither of us had seen as adults (we were amazed that parts of Mississippi and Florida had hills!)   I didn’t think to take pictures on most of the drive, but let me tell you we saw lots of I-10 and a surprising amount of rain - every time I drove it would rain, and we were starting to worry we’d see a beach through rain.

We broke up the drive into 2 days, and decided to just stop when we felt like it and find a room.  It worked really well for us both ways.  

Most of the way there we drove in rain, but as we came across the Tampa Bay bridge the sky finally cleared and we had great weather the entire time we were there.

Once we were at St Pete Beach we were very happy that everything we needed was in one spot.  We’d chosen a resort, Guy Harvey Outpost, that had restaurants (and bars) on site and where we could walk right out to the beach and it gave us everything we wanted.   They even had a happy hour each day with free drinks out by the pool bar - we took advantage of that the first day!

We fully enjoyed the amenities at the resort and also made sure we got out in the town a bit too.   The day we arrived, Kevin heard live music and we walked across the sand to a great beach bar next door– the Toasted Monkey.  We made several return trips there and also enjoyed meals at different restaurants just across the street (loved not getting back in the car!) on different days:  a delicious seafood place, a very rustic Cuban place, and a small diner that had Greek and Italian food along with salads.

The most appealing part of the resort was that we could walk right out to the beach and spend most of the day there.   We had use of a cabana – basically two connected lounge chairs with a table top with cut out cup holders in between and an adjustable shade – each day, and made good use of it.   Some people had the shade all the way down but I like to be in the shade and would sit and read when I wasn’t playing in the water.  We were able to reserve the cabana online the night before and could walk right to it in the morning; we could even order a drink through a website on my phone!  (We did that only once)

our cabana

Our resort was the smaller of two resorts run by the same company.   We could walk down the beach to that resort and enjoy the restaurants there.   We ate down there a few times and were very happy we were staying at the smaller one, we were able to enjoy both and didn't have to put up with all the noise from the larger one --- they had a DJ out at the pool doing games for kids and giveaways, we also saw one wedding party coming through on Saturday night.  Nice to visit, but glad we weren't staying there.  That resort also had a huge slide on the beach that we could use – I LOVED that slide!    Our resort also had an adults only pool, we’d walk by the kid pool on the way back from the beach and very happily go to the quiet of the adults only pool, only thing it didn't have was a bar.

The water was wonderful.  It was a bit rough the first couple of days – our plans of taking a dolphin watching tour were nixed since it was so rough.  We had fun just swimming and we bought boogie boards to do some body surfing – Kevin got pretty good at catching waves.    We joked that there was a ‘water taxi’ there was so much current pulling you southward.  When we wanted to ride the slide we’d get in the water and let the ‘taxi’ take us down towards the other resort.  We also made sure to walk up the beach before getting in so we wouldn't have such a long walk back.

I think that's enough reading for now :)   I plan to do another post about specific places we went.