Thomas Drive runs east out of Panama City Beach until the condo towers give out and the road ends inside St. Andrews State Park. The park holds the last mile and a half of the peninsula, white sand the whole way, with fishing piers and rock jetties at the tip where the ship channel cuts into St. Andrew Bay. Inside the jetties the water lies flatter than the open beach, which is where most people end up swimming.
Across that channel, Shell Island runs off east with no bridge to it and nothing built on it, and everyone who goes over gets there by boat.
The campground is on the bay side of the park, two loops on Lower Grand Lagoon, back under the pines with most of the sites facing the water. Get a pad there before you get the van. Those two loops are the constrained part of this trip and they do not sit idle, while the van is the booking you can set to whatever dates they hand you. Every pad has water, 30- and 50-amp electric, and sewer, plus a picnic table and grill, and Florida State Parks puts laundry in the campground and the site limit at 50 feet (as of August 2026).
The alternatives people picture are not alternatives. Shell Island has no road and no vehicle camping, and Camp Helen out west is day use.
Water, power, and sewer at the pad means the van sits still for the week and never makes a dump run, which is most of the argument for sleeping inside the park instead of driving in every morning for a parking spot. Fishing off the piers and the jetties is the evening version of the same idea, a hundred yards from where you are parked.
Camping runs $28 a night plus tax, and the park adds a nonrefundable $6.70 reservation fee and a $7 nightly utility fee on top of that (as of August 2026). If friends drive out to meet you, day admission is $8 for a vehicle carrying two to eight people, $4 with one person in it, and $2 on foot or on a bike. Reservations go through Florida State Parks, and summer dates go early.
Spring break and the peak of summer pull on the same two loops and on the same local vans, so the pad and the rental go scarce in the same weeks rather than separately. A beach week at the park is one booking problem, not two.
Fifty feet is far more room than a camper van needs, so if you want more beds than a van has, RVs out of Panama City Beach book into the same sites. Construction continues on the rest of the campground, and the work area stays closed while it runs.
Sand Pond and Pine Log State Forest, north on SR-79
Fourteen miles up SR-79 near Ebro the beach traffic thins out and the country turns to longleaf pine. Pine Log has been a state forest since 1936, the first one Florida set aside, and Sand Pond is the campground inside it.
Sites there have electric and water, the restrooms have showers, and there is a dump station on site, with reservations through ReserveAmerica (as of August 2026). Primitive sites sit out along the creek for anyone willing to give up the showers, and a $2 day pass covers you if you only want to walk the trails.
Come here when St. Andrews is full, or when a week of salt and sun has worn thin and pine shade sounds better than another afternoon on the sand. It is a different trip from the coast, and it is close enough that you can still spend the day at the beach and drive back up to sleep.
Camp Helen and the coast west
At the far west end of town, Camp Helen State Park sits on the ground between the Gulf, Phillips Inlet, and Lake Powell, one of the coastal dune lakes that only turn up along this stretch of the panhandle. It is day use only, so it is an afternoon and not a night.
Keep going west on 98 and the beach campgrounds belong to Destin, and past that Pensacola picks up the barrier islands and the national seashore. Everything else in the state is on the Florida hub.