Getaway.

I just got back from Fort Pickens Campground in the Gulf Islands National Seashore, on Santa Rosa Island near Pensacola. It is one of my favorite places on Earth. For a couple of years now, I've been going camping there with a group of my friends, once in the spring and once in the fall. The campsites are cheap, there's plumbing, and the beach is close, pristine, and almost completely empty. We bring too much food and beer and consume most of it.

This time we had chicken cordon bleu, slow-cooked pork ribs, wild Alaskan salmon, these neat little toasted-bread-with-garlic-and-fancy-bits things, fresh corn and baked potatoes, breakfast burritos, a bottle of mead.... Obviously, this is not camping in the sense of roughing it. This visit, I finally took the guided National Park Service tour of the fort itself, and got my passport stamped. The weather was just ideal, maybe 70 degrees in the day and in the high 50s at night. We snagged two primo campsites with good shade trees, and it turns out we had almost the entire D loop to ourselves. The moon was close to full, there were monarch butterflies flitting around, somebody across the campground strung up Christmas lights, and the sound of the surf lulled me to sleep. It was great.