At 7:58 on a Saturday morning last April, Dana sat at the kitchen table with the reservation page open and her finger over the trackpad, and I stood behind her holding a coffee I'd been told not to talk over. By 8:01 we had three nights at Bahia Honda State Park for the end of March 2026, on a site with water and electric. We owned a tent at the time. We booked the hookups anyway, on a hunch that eleven months later we'd have something to plug in.
We did. Last Thursday we towed the pop-up across the Seven Mile Bridge for the first time (that drive gets its own post) and pulled into the park a little after 3 p.m., with the east wind already shoving at the folded camper before I'd cranked the roof up.
The site, the wind and the setup
Shade was thin, a few low buttonwoods that did more for the picnic table than for us. In late March that's fine. In July it would be a problem. Bugs were almost nonexistent while the wind blew, apart from a short round of no-see-ums at dusk that sent Maya into the camper with her book. The bathhouse was a short walk, clean, with a line for the showers around 7 p.m.
Setup took about 30 minutes, down from 50 at Long Pine Key in February. Most of the difference was the packing system and Maya reading the steps off the list on the door. The wind ran 15 to 20 mph out of the east all three days, and the canvas on the bed ends snapped and breathed all night. I slept fine. Dana slept with earplugs. The kids didn't notice a thing. We never needed the roof AC. Lows were around 70, and the breeze did the work.
One honest miss: we brought the screen shelter and never set it up. In that wind it would have been a kite. It rode down and back in the Pilot, taking up a whole corner for nothing.
Three days on a small island
The water is the reason people book this park, and it delivered. Off the beach on the calmer west end it was clear enough that Nico could see his own feet in water up to his chest, which he narrated at length. We snorkeled Friday and Saturday mornings before the wind picked up, and I'll write up how that went with a nine-year-old and a six-year-old separately.
Friday evening we walked up to the old bridge overlook for sunset. The old span just stops in midair over the channel, and from up there you look down at water that changes from pale green to dark blue along a line you could draw with a ruler. Maya filled two pages of her nature journal: a brown pelican diving, a heron on the rocks and a sea cucumber she found in the shallows and refused to touch.
Saturday afternoon we fished from shore on the bay side with the two rod combos I'd bought in March. Nico caught a mangrove snapper just over the minimum size, and it became fish tacos that night. That story gets its own post too, because he would never forgive me if it didn't.
What it cost, from the trip log
- Campsite, 3 nights with water and electric: $147.80
- Gas: $64
- Groceries: $112 (Dana says a fruit stand counts as a grocery store, so the Robert Is Here milkshakes on the way down went in here)
- Fish sandwiches in Marathon on the drive home: $54
- Ice and firewood: $18
- Cat sitter, 3 visits: $45
That's $441 for three nights, or about $147 a night for four people. The two rod combos ($58) and my saltwater license ($17) added another $75, but I'm keeping those out of the trip total since they'll be around for years. The campsite itself worked out to about $49 a night, which still feels like a bargain for that water.
Worth eleven months?
Yes, with one caveat. A March Keys trip is a wind trip, and a pop-up is a canvas box. If you sleep light, pack earplugs. If you were counting on a screen shelter, plan on leaving it in the car.
On Sunday morning, while I was cranking the roof down, Nico asked if we could come back next year. Dana already had her phone out. There's a reminder in it now for the end of April that just says "8 a.m. Bahia?" The question mark is for baseball.
