Walking the Beaches of Pinellas County

Over five days in May 2026, I walked the Gulf barrier islands of Pinellas County from Honeymoon Island State Park to Fort De Soto Park, covering nearly 45 miles of sand and sidewalk, entirely on foot.

Along the way, I passed through bustling tourist hubs, quiet residential beach towns (both welcoming and not), state parks, hurricane recovery zones, and some of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in Florida, all while carrying everything I needed in my backpack and learning the meaningful difference between “going to the beach” and truly experiencing a place.

This series is a day-by-day account of that walk: the scenery, the exhaustion, the strange encounters, and the increasingly complicated question of why I felt compelled to do it in the first place.

The series combines real-time, long-form narrative writing with photography, route planning and mapping, local history, and on-the-ground observation to document a part of Florida that is often experienced only in fragments: individual beaches, towns, hotels, or vacations, rather than as one continuous landscape.