The parking lot at Manatee Public Beach fills up by 10 a.m. in July. If you already live in Palma Sola, you don't care. Summer here isn't the off-season, it's the season the neighborhood actually belongs to the people who live in it. The visitors are penned in on the sand and the trolley. The rest of the pocket, the preserve trails, the botanical gardens, the shaded stretch of Manatee Avenue west of 75th, opens up.
The trick to a good summer week in this pocket is understanding that Palma Sola sits on a hinge. Fifteen minutes east, Robinson Preserve is quieter and larger than most residents realize. Fifteen minutes west, the free island trolley makes Anna Maria walkable without a car. Everything worth doing in July and August is built around one of those two directions, and around dodging the 2 p.m. sun in between.
The 7 a.m. move: Robinson Preserve before the crowd
Most people who live within a mile of Robinson think of it as the trail with the tower. That's about a third of what's there. The preserve now runs to more than 680 acres of mangrove, tidal marsh, and former farmland, connecting to Perico Preserve as a wildlife corridor between the mouth of the Manatee River, Perico Bayou, and Palma Sola Bay,
