Slightly outside of Bradenton, FL and only an hour south of Tampa is Lake Manatee State Park. We stayed here during a visit to Tampa to visit Cigar City Brewery and enjoyed exploring the treasures that yet another state park provided us with. Lake Manatee is situated on a lake in a less built up area of Florida making it a nice escape from the city.

The park offers a variety of opportunities to enjoy the outdoors including, biking, boating, camping, swimming, picnicking, hiking, canoeing, kayaking, fishing, and geo-seeking, with a playground and picnic shelters for visitors as well. As usual, we went on a hike to explore the park and its sites. We arrived in the afternoon and went along a trail called the Gopher Trail. The trail was very flat with tall grass and fan palms with only a few trees, making for a nice leisurely walk. During our walk we came across several different types of tortoises, including one extremely tiny so, watch out! The majority of the campers were people who were RVing so they stayed in their RV’s and we had the park essentially to ourselves. In the evening, armadillos came out in abundance and even greeted us at our tent.

 

We both enjoyed the varied critter experiences we had since they were quite different than what we were used to. Afterwards, we enjoyed the sunset along the water and spent the evening relaxing at the campsite before heading out to explore De Soto National Memorial the next day.

 

Side Note: This little guy looks big, but in fact he was actually about the size of a small fist-please keep an eye out when you are walking!