8th Stop - Okaloosa Island Beach & Eglin AFB (FL)

Blog Post #15 - Written June 1, 2025

Stay: May 19-20, 2025


We've been traveling south to Crestview, FL to chase the sun and allow time for Michigan to warm up, but also to establish our Florida residency (get FL DLs, register the truck and trailer in FL, etc). We boondocked at our mail-forwarding service (MyRVMail) and went into town to the DMV to file all our paperwork. The only problem was that because we have a loan on the trailer, the lender has the original title and we only have a memorandum of title, which was acceptable for the Ohio DMV, but not for Florida! So that was a super lame surprise, and since it could take a couple weeks for them to send it and we weren't staying that long, we gave up and just went to the beach. We'll try again when we're back in FL in December.

We went to the John Beasley Park on Okaloosa Island. They have cool little sand dunes and beautiful white sands. The water was super clear, but did have a bit of algae. We enjoyed swimming and playing anyway, despite the lack of fish to see and shells to collect. We did see a few cool jellyfish (forgot my GoPro, so no underwater pics) and tons of these weird little jelly ball things, which I have been unable to identify, so if you know what they are, please let me know! And unfortunately, we got totally fried, in order of severity: Q, Megan, D, Z, and myself. We sunscreened twice, wore hats and shirts the whole time, and still underestimated the power of the sun reflecting off the clear water and white sand. Q and Megan both peeled quite a bit, and Q burned his cheeks so bad they blistered :( poor boy. We felt like terrible parents!

Weird little jelly balls we collected in sand toy buckets


On the way back, we stopped by the Elgin Air Force Base, which is the largest Air Force base (geographically speaking) in the world, covering 724 square miles.  They had an awesome armament museum with tons of guns, cannons, and planes. Elgin is a big testing site, so they test new weaponry and munitions.  I would highly recommend visiting their free armament museum if you're in the Crestview/Destin area.




Check out these BIG guns! 💪 


PS - if you're ever in Crestview, FL, you need to go eat at Pounders Hawaiin Grill. It was sooooo good! Prices were reasonable, food was delicious, and portions were generous. The teriyaki chicken, garlic chicken, kalua pork, and even their rice was scrumdiddlyumptious! Plus they had a big, fun playground for the kids. We got 2 big (3 meat) plates to share for dinner and had leftovers, but loved it so much we wanted more leftovers (since we were leaving the next morning before they would be open) and we bought another big plate to take with us :)


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