Vacation Reviews: St. Pete's Beach Florida

Tradewinds Island Grand Resort

On Memorial Day weekend of 2005, we traveled to St. Pete's Beach Florida and stayed at the Tradewinds Island Grand Resort. It was a very nice trip. We stayed for 5 nights and traveled with our 3 1/2 year old daughter and our 1 1/2 year old son. The St. Pete's Beach area is very nice and there are plenty of places around the area to go to. The Tradewinds Island Grand Resort was also a nice place. It is very family friendly. It would also be good for groups and possibly younger couples. The service was decent, no complaints, and our room was clean. We had a basic standard room. The room was nice, clean, and decorated in good taste, although a little small for the 4 of us. It was fine though, we didn't complain. There are larger rooms that you can get.

The resort itself is in good condition, although it is not a 5 start hotel. You can find a slight, maybe hurricane scars, but it is still a very satisfying place. There are several pools. There are two family pools, an adult pool, a kiddie pool, hot tubs, and a smaller pool under a roof.

The beach in fantastic. It is huge and stretches for miles. Plenty of room to play and relax in the white powdery sand. On the beach, in front of the resort, there was a huge inflatable dinosaur slide that you could buy a ticket to do down. It was very fun.

The resort had several restaurants. We ate at the little market in the lobby when we first arrived and at the Pizza Hut and Ice Cream area in the hotel. We did not try the sit down restaurants on the property. We did order lunch by the pool and the food we ordered was good. We did have to wait a while to flag down a waitress and we had to go to the bar for menus and stuff. It was also a little hard to snag a table by the pool, but we did. It was a little busy, probably due to it was a holiday weekend. We ate at a couple of restaurants across the street. We also shopped at several stores and went to a miniature golf course on the same street. You can rent paddle boats to float around the fresh water channel that goes throughout the resort.

In the center of the resort, there is also miniature golf. We self parked our rental car and had no problems. The parking lot was close and hardly a walk at all. On Memorial Day we signed up and paid to go to a special Memorial Day party that the resort was having that night on the beach. There was a huge tent on the beach with a catered dinner buffet that was awesome. There was also a DJ with dancing and silly contests and face and body painting for the kids. At dark there were fireworks. It was fun. During our stay at St. Pete's Beach, we went to a couple Florida beaches that were supposed to be in the top 10 beaches in the Continental United States. We went to Fort deSoto Park. The beach was nice. There was a sand bar out in the water that you could swim or wade out to. We also went to Caladesi Island State Park. You have to buy a ticket and take a shuttle boat out to the island. It was a decent beach, but we didn't think it was totally worth waiting in line and taking a boat ride to. Although, we are spoiled and we always compare every beach to the ones we have been to in Hawaii. On one day we drove to Disney World's Magic Kingdom. It is supposedly a 1 1/2 hour drive, but it took us much longer due to construction traffic. It was a good day. Our kids were pretty little, so we went knowing that we would just take our time and do what we could. We stayed until midnight, so it was a long, tired drive back to the hotel. I couldn't keep my eyes open at all and I was worried my husband would fall asleep while driving. Going to Disney World for the day is possible from St. Pete's Beach. If I had to do it again, though, I would do Disney on the last day or so of the vacation and get a cheaper hotel in Orlando and then fly out of Orlando. Overall, we had a great time in St. Pete's Beach, Florida. It was a fun trip that the kids still remember even though they were pretty little.