Potstfarm: TNJed is correct. The beach access is about a 5 minute walk away, about 200 yards total I believe from the front entrance of the Cottages at Camp Creek. It's not a large community, so I would think at most it would be about 300 years (CCK could chime in here, too). Parents with a 3 and 6 year old will be just fine. There are stairs going down to the beach because we're up on dunes. Being up on dunes makes us feel better during hurricane season and we don't think of the stairs one way or the other, even when we're travelling with grandparents or young children. If someone couldn't navigate stairs, that would be a different story of course.
There are two ways to deal with the beach chair issue. One is to buy some beach chairs at Publix for about $12.00 each and bring them back and forth to the beach. We leave chairs and beach things for our guests at our cottages and that's what they use and that's what we use when we're there. I recommend getting the lightest chairs you can find and ideally chairs that recline (that's what we leave at the cottage). Sometimes someone will take a chair or two if you leave them at the beach, though, for a few hours and you don't want to leave them overnight.
We'll be there in August and this time I'm tempted to get beach chair service for us because I may want to just spoil myself. And of course by trying out a beach chair service I'll be able to tell guests about the difference. I have no doubt the beach chair service chairs and umbrellas are cushier and it is nice to have someone set them up for you.
So, it's really a matter of how much money you want to spend on vacation and how cushy you want your chairs to be... I've been longing for cushy lately but we've gone 5 years very happy with our folding beach chairs that we bring back and forth to the cottage. But I'm getting tempted and may succumb to cushy beach chair temptation this next trip.
You'll love the Cottages at Camp Creek -- very family friendly, great porches, nicely built cottages (convenient), well kept, big pool. The beach near us doesn't get very crowded (and I've been there in July as well as off season), so that's nice. You must bring the family to the Villages of South Walton (1 mile east) Dancing Fountain that lights up at night and dances to music. Last year, it would dance to music at around 8:30 at night -- kids love to run through it and play. Very funn. You can get ice cream at Seacrest Cafe or just bring your own snack and eat it at one of the tables. Rosemary Beach is nice to walk around, too (about 1.4 miles east). Deer Lake State Park is truly awesome -- stunning. With young children, there's a very long walk on the boardwalk to get to the ocean (and only an out house for a bathroom), but it's probably like nothing you've ever seen -- lots of natural rambling dunes, no homes, and you get a sense of what the area used to look like before the development. We also like going to Grayton Beach State Park because it's so family friendly -- has bathrooms, easy parking, grills, showers, ramp to the beach. Very convenient and costs under $10 and probably closer to $5.00 as an entrance fee. Great place to go if you want to spend all day there.
Feel free to pm me if you want any more information about the Cottages at Camp Creek or our favorite things to do with the kids (and what we don't like to do). Frankly, when we're there we pretty much spend all of our time at the pool, beach, and porch and the dancing fountains. We get very lazy.
Have a fantastic time.
