The nearest place to a proper beach day near our Largo place: 95 acres of Gulf-front county park with lifeguards, showers and changing rooms, a shaded dog park rated one of the best in Pinellas, a playground, fishing, and all-day parking for about seven dollars. It’s ten minutes north of our door, and it’s everything Clearwater Beach is, without the crowds.
A wooden boardwalk over the water, a working fishing fleet, dolphins that come right up to the docks, and about a hundred shops and restaurants — fifteen minutes from our Largo place and twelve from Seminole. It’s the busiest attraction in the county with over 14,000 reviews at 4.6 stars. It also has the most predatory parking on the coast, and that one fact will decide whether you have a good day.
Half a mile of Greek restaurants, sponge shops and working boats along the Anclote River — the largest sponge market in the world in its day, and still run by the descendants of the divers who built it. You can watch a diver go over the side in a canvas suit, eat the best gyro in Florida, and be back at the beach by dinner.
The southern tip of St Pete Beach, two streets wide, with a historic main street, a working fishing pier, a restaurant serving breakfast since 1938, and the shuttle to Shell Key. No high-rises, no chain anything, and the shelling at the 4th Avenue access is the best on the beach. This is where locals go when they want the beach to feel like it did fifty years ago.
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…
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.