39.3 mi / 12.8 mph / 333 ft. climbing
Home: Topsail Hill Preserve State Park

The guy next to us was (unusually) in a backpacking tent, and as we all turned in, he launched into some comically-loud snoring. Rett was immediately frustrated, while I was pleased to learn that my own snoring (which also frustrates her) isn’t nearly that loud. Either way, once Rett fell asleep (well after me), I was pleasantly surprised that neither of us heard him for the rest of the night.

But maybe his open-mouthed exhalations were responsible for the absolute soaking we got overnight? It never actually rained, but we might have been drier if it had. We barely even had any trees above us, but the fog condensing on the palm fronds 40 feet up steadily dripped on our tent for much of the night. The fog refused to relent until well into the day’s warmth.

Yesterday returned us from the week-long emptiness of the Big Bend region to the chaotic civilization of a real city; today we continued on into the ribboned un-civilization of beachfront resorts, a conveyor belt of high rise hotels and big-box beach shops, the likes of which we haven’t seen since somewhere on the Atlantic side of Florida.

After 10 miles of high-rises, the density of the beachfront buildings became more house-sized, and 10 miles later when we turned off US-98 onto FL-30A, the hamlet of Rosemary Beach was something entirely different. The narrow crowded road became much less-rideable, forcing us to figure out which “side” was for walking and which for riding, but the mature trees that choke down the road were the first clue that this is a place where people actually make their homes. We pulled over in front of city hall to eat our lunches amidst Spanish-accented houses that look more like they belong in Savannah than anything we’ve seen in more than 1000 miles of Florida. (Wikipedia later told me that Rosemary Beach is a planned community built in 1995, following the tenets of “New Urbanism”; I guess the fact that it felt unusual to me is proof of its success!)

A big goal of “New Urbanism” is to have bicycle and pedestrian trips replace vehicle trips. And certainly there were plenty of bikes (mostly of the e- variety) on the “trails”, which required much more switching from side to side of 30A, and pedestrian/cyclist dodging, and crack/root/hole-bumping than I would allow to grade it a success. But the further out we got from “town”, the more the trail opened up and became a proper bike trail.

Topsail Hill Preserve State Park is our 11th and final state park in Florida. We’re sad to leave behind what is likely the best State Park campground system in the country, but glad to close out our run with an especially good site. They have a tent-only loop here, with all “walk-in” sites, so we felt entirely alone amidst the quiet trees. Rett had wanted to do laundry yesterday, but was too hot and worn out to make that happen, so I took care of it today. Unfortunately there was a centralized laundry building, rather than the machines-at-each-bathhouse setup we’ve seen at other parks (including last night’s!), since our bathhouse tonight was about 20 steps from our tent. But that tiny bit of hardship is probably a good way to ease us back into a reality where state park campgrounds don’t have laundry machines at all!