Palm Island Weekend

For the past few years, our friend Mike and a group of his friends have rented condos on Palm Island the week before Father’s Day. He invited us to join him a couple of times but for various reasons we weren’t able to go. With no plans this year, we finally accepted the invitation and drove down on Saturday.

Palm Island is a small barrier island not far from Sarasota with a collection of cottages and villas called the Palm Island Resort occupying most of the north end. There is no bridge to the island so you have to take a short ferry ride to get there. There are also very few roads, and once on the resort property, it is strictly golf carts and bikes. We left our car parked on the “mainland” and paid the pedestrian walk-on fee ($7 a person) for the ride across.

This is not the place for someone looking for lots of activity. The resort has a restaurant, a coffee/ice cream shop, tennis courts, a couple of shared swimming pools, and kayaks and paddle boards to rent. But mainly it is a place to get away and chill, and that is exactly what we did. Mike and his friends had set up tents on the beach where we hung out all day, floating in the water or taking walks to look for shells and shark's teeth. Mike’s kids were a lot better at spotting the shark's teeth than Ron and I. We only found two but they had handfuls of them. We also had fun tooling around the dirt roads on the golf cart. For dinner that night, everyone brought food down to the beach and we watched a spectacular sunset while we ate on the sand.

sea turtle nest

"Shark's Tooth Beach", the northernmost point of the island

dinner on the beach

In the morning before everyone else was awake, Ron and I grabbed some coffee from the coffee shop to take down to the beach for one last walk. We saw a group of people taking a yoga class and three brand new turtle nests. What a beautiful, peaceful place.

turtle tracks