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Anastasia State Park

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Anastasia State Park is a great park close to the sights in the nation's oldest continuous city, St. Augustine, Florida . It's a great home base for swimming, hiking, and exploring ancient wonders. The park sits on Anastasia Island and covers about 1,600 acres of beach, tidal marsh, maritime forest, and ancient dunes. Locals call it South Beach, and the state has owned it since 1949. What makes it special is the quarry. This is where the Spaniards dug the stone to build the Castillo de San Marcos . The park itself comes down to a few hiking trails, a campground, and a beach. Small, but it doesn't act like it. The Park Hiking, camping, swimming, or just standing outside on purpose: this small but mighty park has you covered. Hiking The park has a network of trails, and four of them are worth your time. The Coquina Quarry Trail is a short walk to the old mine where the Spaniards pulled the rock for the Castillo de San Marcos. Workers were hauling blocks out of ...
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Black Hills Trip Planner: Where to Go and What to Skip

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One of the areas we explored in great detail on our first cross-country trip as a family was the Black Hills of South Dakota . Looking at the map, I started with the Badlands, mostly because that's where I could get camping reservations. Then I found Wind Cave and thought a cave sounded cool. From there I realized this was also where Mount Rushmore lives, and I accidentally stumbled onto Custer State Park. Planning by accident: highly recommended, would not do it again. This short trip didn't even scratch the surface. There is so much more I could have done. Fair warning: the Black Hills are a lot like my jokes. You'll find them everywhere, and somehow there's always one more. In this article I'm laying out the places worth your time: what each stop is, which of my posts go deeper, and which tours and trails to pick. Don't think of this as a fully packaged tour. Think of it as the menu for your own adventure, and I promise the puns are all-you-can-eat. In ...
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Custer State Park: The Pigtail Bridges, the Begging Burros, and the Buffalo Who Are Not Impressed

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Custer State Park is famous for two things: the Cathedral Spires along the Needles Highway , and the animal drive. We already covered Needles Highway back when we promised we'd circle back to the animal drive eventually — turns out "eventually" was this trip. After leaving Mount Rushmore, we took Iron Mountain Road down toward the animal drive. We came prepared for neither the amount of time this would take, nor the carrots the donkeys were expecting. Iron Mountain Road Iron Mountain Road is Needles Highway's quieter sibling — less about jaw-dropping spires, more about getting you from Mount Rushmore back to Custer State Park without adding hours to your trip. Unlike the Needles Highway, it's open year-round, and the road itself has a pedigree: Senator Peter Norbeck scouted the route on horseback in the early 1930s, personally staking out a path that engineers told him was impossible. He got the last laugh — construction ran from 1932 to 1936, and Norbeck w...
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Location: Custer State Park, South Dakota, USA
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Wekiwa Springs State Park: A Spring, a Sportsman's Club, and a Lesson I Refused to Learn

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Wekiwa Springs State Park is one of our favorite local parks, and it comes with tenure — we've been going since childhood, thanks to a grandfather who lived twenty minutes away in Altamonte Springs and treated "let's go to the spring" as a legitimate substitute for supervision. The park turns out to be much bigger than the swimming hole it's famous for: it protects a solid chunk of the watershed feeding the main spring and its run. There's a second park nearby, Kelly Park (also known as Rock Springs Run), which is excellent in its own right — but that's a story for another day. History Wekiwa Springs has been pulling in visitors since the 1860s, back when it went by the less catchy name of Clay Springs. By the 1890s, someone had the very Florida idea of slapping a hotel and bathhouse on top of it and calling the water medicinal — a marketing strategy that predates Walt Disney World by more than seventy years and requires considerably less capital inves...
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Location: Wekiwa Springs State Park, 1800 Wekiwa Cir, Apopka, FL 32712, USA
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