Tampa

Fort De Soto — Historic Batteries, Gulf Beaches & the Kayak Trail

The largest park in Pinellas County, Fort De Soto spreads across five interconnected keys at the mouth of Tampa Bay, an hour southwest of downtown Tampa. A single active day here moves from history to wildness: the mortar batteries of a Spanish-American War coastal fort still bristle with their original guns, while a short walk away the Gulf-facing North Beach — repeatedly ranked among the finest beaches in the country — runs in a broad crescent of white sand and shallow turquoise water. Between them lie a paddling trail that threads the mangrove lagoons, fishing piers reaching into the Gulf and the bay, and some of the best shorebird habitat on Florida's west coast, where the keys sit squarely on a major migration flyway. It is a day of forts, flats, and open water within easy reach of the city.

Anna Maria Island — Old Florida Beach Town, the City Pier & a Gulf Sunset

A slow, sun-warmed day on the seven-mile barrier island that has resisted high-rises and chain sprawl to keep the flavor of old Florida intact. Anna Maria Island sits just an hour southwest of Tampa across the Sunshine Skyway approaches, a place of pastel cottages, a free open-air trolley, and some of the softest quartz-sand beaches on the Gulf Coast. The day begins in the sleepy northern village of Anna Maria at the historic City Pier and the wild, uncrowded sands of Bean Point, where Tampa Bay meets the Gulf of Mexico. From there it's a lazy trolley ride down Pine Avenue and Bridge Street for lunch and browsing, an afternoon of swimming on the shallow, bathtub-warm Gulf, and finally the whole point of the island — a slow, spectacular sunset over the water.

Tarpon Springs — The Greek Sponge Docks & St. Nicholas Cathedral

Barely forty-five minutes northwest of Tampa lies the most concentrated Greek-American community in the United States, a Gulf-coast town that has smelled of natural sponge and grilled octopus for well over a century. Tarpon Springs boomed in the early 1900s when sponge divers from the Dodecanese islands — chiefly Kalymnos, Symi, and Halki — were recruited to work the rich sponge beds off the Anclote River, and they turned the working waterfront into a living transplant of the Aegean. This one-day journey works the historic Sponge Docks end to end: a sponge-boat tour that demonstrates the old hard-hat diving rig, the magnificent neo-Byzantine St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral built of Greek marble, the bakeries turning out baklava and galaktoboureko, and a long lunch of Greek food at a dockside taverna. It is a full day of one of Florida's most distinctive and authentic cultural pockets, all within an easy drive of the city.