Florida Gulf Coast Guide

The Florida Gulf Coast offers so much more than your typical Florida beach vacation! It is the only place where I have lived and traveled where family beach vacations allow the entire family to have the best of both worlds.

It is easy to plan a Florida vacation where you devote a day or two to the Orlando or Tampa attractions and then spend the rest of the week on the Florida Gulf Coast and go kayaking, fishing, take in a nature tour or two, drop in on a few Florida State Parks, do some terrific shopping and still enjoy a few days at the beach playing.

The Gulf Coast beaches are usually calm, clear, shallow and warm which makes them excellent for kids. The Florida Gulf Coast really is "Florida's Best Kept Secret."

One of the reasons that you can do so much in a short period of time is because many of these places are within reasonable driving distances of one another (1-3 hours).

These choices also exist because Florida has many wild areas left in the State and so many species that either live or pass through Florida on their seasonal migrations. This makes for a whole lot of biodiversity and a whole bunch of vacation choices like hiking, biking, birding and canoeing which are all fantastic kidcentric activites. I have found that even the most modest of State Parks has a lot to offer.

You can combine a visit to one of the big theme parks in Orlando with a Gulf Coast beach vacation where you can go beachcombing on Florida beaches, take nature tours where one can observe Florida wildlife up close, or spend a few hours at one of the many Florida Parks.

I created this website to share my love of the Florida Gulf Coast in part because after living in a Northern City for years, I began to notice that my trips to Florida every few months were the few times when I was truly happy, and I began to think about how I could change that.

So, one of the reasons for this sort of "Florida Travel Guide" is that I want to spend more time in Florida with the people I love and in the places I love and maybe give some of you the desire to plan a memorable Florida family beach vacation!

I want to especially promote the Florida Gulf Coast to families raising kids so they can plan a vacation and give them that priceless experience of the natural world beyond the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet. Don't get me wrong, I really love both of those channels...

But growing up in Florida, I really got to see and feel the natural world everyday and it gave me a confidence in myself that nothing else ever has and it instilled in me an empathy for nature and for human beings that I know very few life experiences can give you.