Camping at Fort Desoto Park ~ Cavedog Running

Monday, March 22, 2010

Camping at Fort Desoto Park

Next up for the weekend was camping at Fort Desoto Park and the Florida Beach Halfathon.

We arrived to Fort Desoto Saturday afternoon to beautiful clear skies and comfortable temperatures. We quickly got camp setup and heated up the beanie weenies Jenny prepared ahead of time for lunch. We then proceeded to spend the afternoon doing much of nothing with spurts of playing with a frisbee we found and exploring the mangroves looking for critters at the canoe openings. Since I was running in the morning, we had spaghetti with grilled garlic bread for dinner. After dinner, we headed out to explore Fort Desoto and the beach. Fort Desoto is a cool place the kids enjoyed walking around looking at all the canons and rooms. We then walked across the parking lot to the beach for one of the most awesome sunsets ever before returning to camp for a fire and hot chocolate. Sleeping was interesting as the wind went from zero to practically tropical storm force instantly. We ended up putting the rain fly on the tent at 2AM as there was some rain approaching. Then there was the raccoons! Fort Desoto is crawling with raccoons that scavenge for scraps day and night. We had 3-4 raccoons around our site looking for food. But, being the smart campers we are, they didn't get anything except for some dish water that one raccoon sipped. These raccoons could care less about humans. We had our flash lights looking at them out the tent where they would come right up to until we banged on the tent to try to scare them off.

[caption id="attachment_356" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Raccoons everywhere!!"]

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[caption id="attachment_357" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Artillery at Fort Desoto"]

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[caption id="attachment_358" align="aligncenter" width="332" caption="Cruise ship sailing off into the great abyss...Not sure what happened to that ship!"]

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[caption id="attachment_359" align="aligncenter" width="332" caption="The Sun Goddess..."]

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[caption id="attachment_360" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Big sun over big pier."]

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[caption id="attachment_361" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Pretty view from under the pier."]

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[caption id="attachment_362" align="aligncenter" width="332" caption="No idea who the kid is. He stepped in from of me, I snapped anyway because I thought it looked cool."]