Walking Pinellas Beaches: Day 5 – Fort De Soto Park

Today’s Walk

Start / End:  Fort De Soto Park – Fort De Soto Park

Distance: ~4 miles / 8,657 steps

Time: 1 hours, 26 minutes

If I could offer just one piece of advice to anyone considering a similar coastal walk, it would probably to not sleep in a hot tent on a pile of shells after walking 40 miles in four days – particularly if you plan to walk another five or six the next day.

Don’t get me wrong. Fort De Soto Park, where Morgan and I camped for the final night of my walk, is gorgeous, and the beachfront campground where we stayed is among the most popular in the country at some times of year.

The “De Soto” in Fort De Soto comes from Hernando De Soto, a 16th-century Spanish explorer who explored the area as part of an absolutely bonkers journey through the New World, before dying and getting a surprisingly large number of things named after him throughout the entire Gulf Coast. The “fort” is also quite literal; it was surveyed by a young Robert E. Lee (who also surveyed Tybee Island’s Fort Pulaski, where I spent a bit of time back in 2022), who recommended the area be fortified.

Today, it’s got two fishing piers, a museum, a snack bar, and a variety of other amenities that make it punch way above its weight when it comes to county parks. But by the time we arrived around 6 on Saturday evening, I wasn’t much in the mood to see any of it.

Although I was dreading the setup process, it went surprisingly easily with Morgan’s help. Setting up the tent alone to test it out before I left had been nothing short of an ordeal, but with another person, we were done in minutes. There’s something to be said for that, I think.

Still, I was in a less-than-ideal mood. I had been riding a bit of a high since finishing the day’s walk, a somewhat unexpected outcome if you’d asked me in the morning. A double rum runner at Paradise Grille on the Pass-a-Grille beach (street parking, $7/hour) also didn’t hurt.

But now, the issues began to stack up. My feet were so swollen I couldn’t fit them in my shoes, nor did I want to try to squeeze them in there with the amount of sunburn they had. My left shoulder, which had bothered me for most of the trip, had now almost entirely frozen up. And I was sunburned basically everywhere that had been exposed to light at any point over the preceding days; I’ve now accepted the fact that there is no level of SPF/UPF, nor frequency of application, that can protect my skin from extended time in the midday Florida sun.

We treated ourselves to a nice seafood dinner at a restaurant near the park, but headed back relatively early. The night is long outdoors, and we wanted to settle in. We both had plans for the evening; Morgan had picked us up a box of wine, and I was going to work on the blog while she caught up on some reading. In reality, we both crashed pretty early. I’d be surprised if either of us even made it to 11:30, lulled to sleep by the dull roar of campers in nearby campsites.

Temporarily lulled, I suppose. I felt like I was awakened basically every hour after that by one thing or another, from late-night music to a group of fearless raccoons I saw scamper up a tree.

When I finally awoke for good when it was too bright to ignore, the decline had continued. The next unexpected casualty were my lips, which were swollen and sunburned enough to make speaking sound as ridiculous as it was painful. An excellent capper for the final day, and truly the only day I had planned to do any talking.

That’s because my parents were driving up from Southwest Florida to meet Morgan and me for a day at the beach. I’ve always remembered my dad taking walks when we were at the beach (although not to the extent I was doing, certainly), and he’d expressed interest in joining me on the final day. As an added bonus, it was Mother’s Day, and I’m grateful to be close enough to get to spend time with my Mom on days like these.

They arrived shortly after we finished packing up our campsite, and I hobbled over to meet them in the parking lot. This was not going to work. My initial plan had been to have Morgan drop my dad and me off at the park’s North Beach, and we’d walk back to the area where she and my mom had set up for the day, then walk beyond to the east end of the park. But it was very clear that wasn’t going to be possible with my feet in the condition that they were, not to mention a humidity level that had me sweating through my shirt before we even reached the beach.

Even my backup plan, which was to just walk east, to at least complete the walk at the very end, with the Skyway bridge looming ahead, was foiled by a large roped-off section of beach in that direction, making the area beyond relatively inaccessible without a detour on park roads. All in all, the combination of physical pain, lack of sleep, and mental frustration had me in a pretty bad mood, despite the best efforts of Morgan and my parents.

I felt extremely defeated. I’d come so close, spent enough time, and endured enough discomfort for no discernible payoff other than an internal one, and I wasn’t even going to truly be able to finish.

Finally, I was done stewing. It was time to do something, at the very least. I was, after all, at the beach, a beautiful one, with my girlfriend and parents. So I grabbed my bag, sprayed on another coat of absurd mango-coconut sunscreen (lesson learned: check the sunscreen bottle for more than just the SPF), and my dad and I set off up the beach toward the northern edge of the park.

As much as I’d struggled before, I was surprised at the ease with which I was walking. Swapping out a heavy pack full of clothes, gear, and supplies for one with a bottle of water and sunscreen is likely to do that, I suppose. I felt free again, and as we walked and talked on a beautiful day, with crystal-clear blue water at our feet, it was easy to remember why I’ve always loved walking on beaches as long as I can remember.

We strolled past the crowds near the entrances, past the quieter portions with only a patchwork of beach tents and surf fishermen (the scourge of beach walkers everywhere), and onto the nearly completely empty part of the beach. But as the cluster of umbrellas at the northern tip of North Beach crept closer, we encountered what would prove to be our stopping point.

A rope was strung across the sand between a series of signs, stretching all the way out into the water. A helpful volunteer, who had the tough job of sitting at the edge of a remote beach keeping wanderers from harassing birds, came over and explained the protected nesting area extended many feet offshore because, as she put it, the birds use the water too.

It dawned on me that, even if I’d tried to do or been able to do the most literal version of my walk, I would have faced major hurdles in Fort De Soto anyway. Miles-long turnarounds. Long stretches on surprisingly busy park roads. It would have been decidedly unpleasant, and as down as I still felt about not completing the walk to my full satisfaction, this made me feel a bit better.

So, we turned around. We looked at Egmont Key offshore and considered how far it was to Bean Point Beach on Anna Maria Island, visible in the distance across the mouth of Tampa Bay. Just about five miles, it turned out; roughly the distance on Long Key between St. Pete Beach and Pass-a-Grille. Dealing with the unusual combination of long-distance visibility ahead, dense claustrophobia on one side, and wide-open spaces on the other can do wonders to shift your sense of distance.

We arrived back at our beach camp near the fishing pier, now fully set up to provide Morgan and my mom some shade and a place to relax. That was as far as this walk would go. I wouldn’t see the Skyway from the tip of the east beach. I wouldn’t truly be able to say I walked it all, at least in one shot. But there was no changing that now.

There’s no doubt it was a bit of an anticlimax. I didn’t even take some wistful final image representative of my struggles and accomplishments. I didn’t even remember to take a picture with my dad as we got back to the chairs.

I have to shoulder most, or at least some, of the blame for pushing myself too hard, too far, and with too much unnecessary stuff in my bag, in the heat and the sun, for days three and four in particular. Long stretches were just not enjoyable ways to spend time, during what was supposed to be a fun, interesting achievement. One of my biggest regrets was not being able to spend more time in the actual communities themselves. Longer and more frequent stops and detours would have given me valuable time off the beach itself, but also provided a more complete picture of these beach towns.

Some of it was unavoidable. The circumstances of life didn’t present me with this opportunity when the weather was a bit cooler and the overall conditions not so intense. Some of it was eminently avoidable; in retrospect, it was dumb to assume that I could match the distance of my longer Jersey Shore walk days in more oppressive conditions, with less training, on legs that were five years older.

All lessons learned, for what Morgan kept referring to as “next time”. I’m not so sure there will be a next time, or what or when that would be. But it’s a lesson nonetheless.

It’s amazing how quickly it’s possible to make the transition back to normal life, even after a few days of abruptly leaving it all behind. I was back to working in the garden the same afternoon I got home, and back at freelance work and the job search the next morning. By midday Monday, the swelling in my feet had gone down enough that I could get my topsiders on, I could lift my left arm up without involuntary noises, and the various sunburns (other than my lips, which may be the most painful of lessons learned) had begun to change from fiery throbbing to dull annoyance.

As time goes by and my gait and skin tone return to normal, I hope I’ll remember the better moments of the walk more clearly than the struggles and frustrations. Fundamentally, there’s a different perspective underneath this walk, compared with my last one five years ago. Back then, it felt like saying goodbye; my last real connection with the state would be officially severed between the first and second halves of that adventure, when my parents sold the home I grew up in.

But now, I live here. In barely an hour’s drive from the southernmost point of this adventure, we were back home. I can, and hopefully will, go back to these places as many times as I want to eat at the restaurants, drink at the bars, browse the shops, and check out the landmarks, museums, sanctuaries, and other attractions I missed or couldn’t fit in along the way.

If I want to take the most optimistic view of this walk (and I don’t always want to do that, still), it was an introduction to some new friends and a brief chat with some acquaintances I’d met in passing before. It’s not reasonable to try to learn everything about someone in your first conversation, or even your tenth. In any case, the foundation for a good relationship has hopefully been laid. We do have a good meeting story, after all.