“It’s like leaving your other life behind.”
St. George Island, Florida
“It’s like leaving your other life behind”
Dr. Beach, (otherwise known as Dr. Stephen Leatherman, Director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research, Florida International University), named Florida’s St. George Island State Park’s nine miles of beach shoreline, the Number Six Top Beach in the World.
As I strolled along this gloriously serene Florida Panhandle shore, it occurred to me that this never ending beach could well be Nature’s answer to the infinity pool. Only much more gorgeous, and not a drop of chlorine.
Part of the charm of this barrier island is its ‘protected status’ regarding development. There are no high rise apartments, no office towers, no rush hour jams, no box stores, and no large chain restaurants. No one missing any of that buzz either.
“It’s like leaving your other life behind,” says Alice Collins, of Collins Vacation Rentals. www.collinsvacationrentals.com.
The number of permanent residents on the Island, or what locals refer to as SGI, is ‘somewhere around ‘999’. There were quite a few times during my stay here, that putting my stake in to be the 1,000th resident seemed quite an attractive idea.
And wow!… the homes you can rent on the Island! I felt like a guest on that ‘rich and famous’ television series. My head was abuzz envisaging extended girls get-aways, beach lay abouts, and wine-fuelled pillow-fight-pajama parties in the six bedroom house on the Gulf of Mexico that I was a dinner guest at.
The house I stayed in, a Resort Vacation Properties rental, www.resortvacationproperties.com, was a four bedroom, four bathroom, fully stocked kitchen designer’s dream. A frosty beverage, piping hot, hot tub, and steamy novel rounded out my days in a manner to which I would like to be accustomed. Like for good.
Several houses on the Island have widow’s peaks sitting astride their roof tops, reverential, salutatory perches to gaze out onto the sparkling salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the vast constellations of twinkling Floridian stars.
If you want to leave your other life behind, St. George Island isn’t a bad place to do it!
