There’s an open-air market on most days of the week here, and one of them is the largest in the southeastern United States. If you’re self-catering with us, a Saturday or Tuesday morning at a market is a better way to stock the kitchen than a supermarket run — and a better morning out.
Pinellas County has four Great Florida Birding Trail sites, a park with 328 recorded species, three observation towers you can climb, and a free seabird hospital on Gulf Blvd where a rescued bald eagle sits a few feet away. If you’ve never given birding a go, this is a good place to start — and if you have, bring the long lens.
Some afternoon of your week will be a washout — a summer thunderstorm, a winter cold front, or just too much sun already. This is the page to open when it happens. Everything here is indoors, and two of the best options are minutes from our Seminole door.
Shelling is the cheapest good thing to do here: it costs nothing, it works for a four-year-old and a seventy-four-year-old equally, and on the right morning you’ll fill a bag. But the rules matter, the tide matters more than the beach, and the best shells are on islands you can only reach by boat.
Two Major League clubs hold spring training within twenty minutes of us, in ballparks small enough that a cheap seat is still a good one. The Blue Jays have been coming to Dunedin for fifty straight years and the Phillies to Clearwater for eighty. If you’ve never done it, a March afternoon at one of…
There are dedicated pickleball courts about a mile from our Largo place with a friendly morning group who’ll let you join in, and four serious indoor clubs within twenty minutes — one with a bar, one with a sauna and cold plunge. Bring paddles, or don’t; most places lend them.
Dunedin has eight breweries and a distillery inside a few walkable blocks, and the Pinellas Trail runs straight through the middle of them. Which means the best brewery day here doesn’t involve a designated driver — it involves a bike.
Both of our places sit on protected water, and the county has mapped the whole coast into an official paddling trail system. You can be in a mangrove tunnel twenty minutes after leaving the door — or have a kayak delivered to the driveway and never load a roof rack at all.
Thirty miles of barrier island, and they are not interchangeable. One is nationally famous and charges forty dollars to park. Another is a ferry-only island with no development at all. The best one for you depends entirely on what kind of day you want — so here’s the honest rundown, north to south.
You can fish four completely different ways from our doorstep — a deep-sea charter out of John’s Pass, a pier where no licence is needed, the surf a few hundred yards from the house, or a freshwater lake full of bass. Here’s how each works, and what licence you actually need.