It’s been a few weeks since my family last visited a Florida State Park. There are still quite a few that we haven’t explored yet.

This time we were heading towards the Gulf side of the state in Dunedin we crossed over the causeway bridge and into the Honeymoon Island State Park.

This trip was a bit unique. My parents have an adorable labradoodle named Sammie, and we found out that this State Park is animal friendly with a specific area of the beach set aside for dogs. Basically a Dog Beach and we thought this would make for a fun outing for our entire family including Sammie.

As with the other State Parks we have visited, there were plenty of nature trails. The only issue we ran into is that the pathways were made up mostly of basically beach sand since we were so close to the actual beach. This made walking a bit of a challenge, and certainly gave our legs a workout.

In the short time we have lived in Florida our family has checked out quite a few different beaches both on the Atlantic and Gulf side. In our opinions we always prefer the Gulf side and this was no exception.

Unfortunately for most of our day we had heavy cloud cover. This made the temperature quite a bit chillier than we were expecting, and the water was void of swimmers due to it’s low temperature a well. It always seemed like we were moments from getting rained on, thankfully we were able to avoid any precipitation. This also meant that not many other dogs made the trip out that day.

There is a fairly large Pavilion on the South Beach side of the island. This is where you will find the restrooms, changing rooms, and a small snack stand.

However, if you are interested in the pressed penny machine you actually need to go underneath this raised pavilion. It seems like a strange place for the machine, and if I hadn’t read about it in pennycollector.com I probably would have missed it and assumed the machine had been removed.

The machine located here is another of the Penny Pincher style models. Not my all time favorite as I find the final pressed penny can be hit or miss with the design either being cut off, or the penny rolled short.

As you can see from the image above, all of my pennies on this trip rolled short. Thankfully the main part of the image was fine, just the dotted border along the right side was cut off. I’ve definitely had worse results with these type of machines, but I was happy with these once for the most part.

With many pressed pennies I get from zoos, aquariums and other places with animals in the designs I’m usually just guessing as to what they are most of the time. This set however has a fun feature, on the reverse of each penny has the name of the critter along with the park website. I honestly wish they would do this more often, as it really is a huge help to us collectors when trying to identify the design.

It was a bit sad that our day was not a usual sunny Florida afternoon, and Sammie didn’t have too many other dogs around to play with. This park though was fantastic and we will definitely be coming back. I’ll just have to do a better job at double checking the weather conditions in advance. That makes one more Florida State Park we can check off our list, leaving quite a few more still to explore. Keep on Pressing!

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