Sebastian Inlet SP – Vero Beach, FL – 2/1/2026 -2/8/2026

We departed from the house at 9:30AM EST and headed East on SR-674 (Sun City Center Blvd) until it ended at FL-37 just South of Mullberry. We took a quick hop up FL-37 to CR-630. We took CR-630 East through Fort Meade (where US-98 joined us for a bit) all the way through Frostproof to SR-60 Southeast of Lake Wales. Between Fort Meade and Frostproof we saw where all of the remaining orange tree fields had been running their sprinklers all night to protect the fruit. There were significant piles of ice below the trees on all of the grass and weeds. We joked about how Frostproof didn’t seem to be living up to its name.

We took SR-60 to a Publix in Vero Beach because we realized while we were driving that we forgot to pack sour cream and low carb wraps (we’re planning to make chicken quesadillas this week). From the Publix we moved on to an Avis Car Rental on US-1 to pickup a rental car. We’ve never been in this are of the East coast and decided we wanted a car in order to do some touring. We reserved it through AARP and ended up getting an automatic upgrade to one of the new Ford Broncos. It’s pretty sporty with a removable hardtop. We may “remove” a portion of the hardtop later in the week when it gets warmer and do some “touring”.

We arrived at the Sebastian Inlet State Park campground at 1:30PM. Florida state parks have 1PM check-out times and 3PM check-in times. In 17 years of camping in Florida state parks, we’ve never had any trouble checking in any time after Noon. Not today. We were told to come back at 2:30PM. So we parked in one of their parking lots, put out the slide-out and ate some wraps for lunch while we watched the Iowa St vs Kansas St game (we were unable to pickup CBS on antenna to watch the Purdue vs Maryland game).

At 2:30PM we were allowed to exit “time out” and moved to our camp site which is right along the Sebastian Inlet channel (with a street between us and the water). We have a very nice view. The only other issue we’ve run into is the campground power. They apologize on their web site for issues regarding power. When it’s very hot or, in our case, very cold and power consumption is very high, the campground voltage can drop below 110 volts. When we arrived, our Electrical Management System (EMS) device was showing 117 volts (which is a pretty low starting point for a fairly empty campground). By 7PM, after all the other campers had arrived, it was down to 111 volts. We had several power glitches (not caused by our EMS going into protection mode). Those power glitches cause our Starlink internet connection to power cycle which means it has to reacquire all of its satellite connections, so we’ve been “roughing it”. We finally had to switch to running a hotspot off of my phone for a bit. Other than those minor issues, we have no complaints although we are worried about our EMS shutting our power off because we anticipate the campground voltage going below 111 volts when the temperature goes below freezing tonight. At that point we will be boon-docking, which we are well equipped for. We have a site with a great view and plan to enjoy it outside once the temperature rises a bit (probably Tuesday). Tonight we will experience several hours below freezing, so we did not hook up a water line.