Walking Pinellas Beaches: Day 3 – The “Bellairs” and the “Indians”

Today’s Walk

Start / End:  Clearwater Beach — North Redington Beach

Distance: ~10.7 miles / 27,006 steps

Time: 7 hours, 9 minutes

Today’s Listens: “Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires” by Scientist, “Future Days” by CAN, Odd Lots podcast – “How Taiwan Became the World’s Most Perilous Geopolitical Chokepoint”

If I can be completely candid, this was not the most fun day of walking or most fun day at the beach I’ve ever had. I woke up profoundly feeling the miles from the day before, and the time spent treating my skin with aloe, CBD pain cream, and sunscreen before leaving had begun to mount. I also promptly forgot my trekking pole at the Airbnb, an inauspicious start to an 11-mile day, the longest yet.

Another ill omen: I stumble upon a gluten-free donut shop while looking for coffee. Sounds great, but these were the messiest donuts I’ve ever encountered, and I start the day sticky, sore, and off balance.

The good news is that I get to walk through what’s undeniably the most hostile stretch of beach today, too – Bellair Beach, Bellair Shore, Indian Rocks Beach, Indian Shores, and North Redington Beach.

All in all, this put me in not the greatest mood, even as I crossed one of the most breathtaking bridges of the route, Sand Key Bridge.

For a long time after we moved here, I could not keep any of these communities straight in my head at all. It doesn’t help that, along with being similarly named, these clone communities are also very similar in character, too.

In the “Bellairs”, that character can basically be summed up as, “don’t come here.” The owners of homes in these exclusive, upscale communities have worked to make it as hard as possible to access the roughly two miles of beachfront that they share, with minimal beach access and parking and next to no commercial development at all. This could not be a starker contrast to Clearwater Beach, just across Sand Key Bridge to the north.

The “Indians” offer a less extreme view of what a quieter, mostly residential Gulf town looks like, with far more options in the way of beach access, restaurants, shopping, and hotels and other rentals. I wish I could tell you more about them, but I didn’t stop.

Instead, I stuck to the (mostly empty) beach, accompanied by the shuttered snowbird homes on my left, and real birds (Today’s Bird of the Day™ is the Cormorant) hanging out along the water.

Naturally, I do a good bit of research before I set off on these kind of adventures. But I can’t say I wasn’t a bit daunted when I looked ahead to the route for this day and saw the first place I could reasonably stop – for lunch, for a bathroom break, for water – was 6.8 miles from where I stayed in Clearwater.

I understand I’m quite literally in the most densely populated country in Florida, a quick Uber ride from multiple popular tourist destinations. But it’s nevertheless a bit unnerving to be at the mercy of car services if things go wrong. They’ve let me down before in highly populated beach towns; ask me sometime about how it took four college-educated adults to figure out a way to get me from LBI to Atlantic City when my Uber abandoned me.

So, in the interest of getting there, I just kept walking. And walking. And walking. After a while, I realized I was not having any fun, so I walked some more.

One of the most common questions I’ve gotten on this walk and my previous one through New Jersey was, “what are you training for?” When I typically explain that I’m not training for anything, not the Appalachian trail, not walking across country, not even the Florida Trail (someday, if I get up the nerve to walk through flooded, snake-filled swamps), the response is usually a little odd. People seem to have a hard time understanding someone would just go out and walk an area they could just drive through, for no reason other than doing it. I guess I’m not even sure why I’m doing it, other than to set a goal for myself and achieve it at a time in my life where many larger and more important things feel somewhat out of my control.

To give you a sense of the general hostility of this area to people on foot, I stopped for lunch a bit later than usual, perhaps from the heat or perhaps spurred onward by how far I still had to go. Only one problem: how to get off the beach? This is much easier said than done.

The private homes and condos went on and on, and I’d already slightly passed my target restaurant anyway. Finally, I found what looked to be an open way to the street, but after opening the (unlocked) gate from the beach, I found myself trapped between that now-locked gate and the one at the street, both of which needed codes. This, my friends, is not my idea of a good time.

Luckily, an older woman eventually came along and let me through, but not before a comment about how I shouldn’t have been in there anyway. I responded that they should lock their gates from the outside in that case, not just the inside. She didn’t seem to appreciate this feedback.

After a quick lunch in aggressive air conditioning (thank you, Caddys), I made my way back onto the beach, this time through friendlier pathways. From here, the end was in sight – 3.6 miles! That’s nothing.

(It wasn’t nothing)

The final segment of the day was barely an hour and change, but I struggled the whole way through. The latest was sunburn, which I had impressively achieved despite using a family-sized bottle (“50% more!”) sunscreen in just three days (I promise I was wearing a hat with neck cape, despite this picture)

I may not have believed it, but my hotel eventually did appear on the horizon, and crept closer step by step. By the time I staggered into the lobby, I was ready for a shower and a long time lying down. I’m a Hilton Gold member but even the front desk didn’t trifle with their whole spiel, because I’m sure at the time I looked somewhere between a shipwreck victim and an escaped mental patient.

In spite of it all, I made it here. My shoulders and calves ache, I’ve got a blister on top of the blister I got training for this, and my face, arms, and legs are an unusual hue somewhere between a deep tan and a raging sunburn.

And just like that, I’m more than halfway through this walk. What will tomorrow bring? Hopefully, it will take me through a day that’s truly a mix of everything I’ve seen so far: tourist spots, quiet residential areas, and frustratingly similarly named small beach towns. Will I actually be able to do a slightly longer day than today, all in time to meet Morgan, set up a tent, and then sleep outside, all before doing this one final day? Truly, only time will tell. In the meantime, I’m going to have another therapeutic mojito and hope for the best.