Florida Vacation
July 1-8, 2005
The Moores joined up with the Smiths and
the McBrides for a week-long vacation trip to the Florida
panhandle during the first week in July. We left Van Buren on a
Friday morning, and drove all day before stopping for the
night in Richland, Mississippi. After checking in at a
motel, we had an excellent dinner at a local barbecue joint.
From there it was straight back to the Super 8 for some
much-needed shut eye.
The next day’s drive to our
destination, near Destin, was supposed to be a relatively short
6 hours. But we got caught in several traffic jams and it was
close to dinner time before we finally arrived at the beach
house we’d rented for the week.
After a fast-food dinner, Brad, Cait,
Cliff, Grant and I drove to Destin Commons mall in hopes of
catching a fireworks display. It seemed as though we’d
missed the show, so we went back to the beach house, only to
see fireworks lighting up the sky behind us on the drive back.
The boys talked me into accompanying them down to the beach,
while Stacey was out grocery shopping. Before she’d left,
Stacey had made us three guys promise not to get in the
water. Yeah, sure.
My favorite times of the week were
the peaceful evenings that I sat on the beach at sundown,
camera in hand, as the boys played in and around the water.
The bedroom Stacey and I stayed in had
patio doors opening up to a small deck facing the ocean. Every
night we left the doors open enough to let in the sound of the
waves crashing onto the beach. Sleeping to that sound was every
bit as nice as I’d always thought it would be, and I
slept in almost every morning because of it.
Stacey began most mornings sitting out on
the deck that was one floor below our bedroom. Our first
morning there, she hollered at me to wake up and stick my head
outside the patio doors and see several dolphins swimming near
the shore. She did that to me several mornings during the week,
but I never did see any dolphins. I either didn’t make it
out of bed in time, or just went back to sleep!
One thing that did get my attention was on
Monday morning, when Stacey yelled up to me that there was a
funnel cloud nearby. I stuck my head out the door to spot it,
safely way up in the clouds above the beach a couple of miles
away.
We all fell into a daily routine of hanging
out on the beach until lunch, then braving the heavy traffic to
check out the local tourist attractions. On Monday, Bass Pro
Shops looked promising from the outside. Inside Stacey snapped
these shots of the boys at the big aquarium.
That evening we enjoyed several heavenly
displays. During the always-stressful ordeal of supervising the
boys while they shot fireworks, God put on his first show of
the evening with a huge rainbow. He then followed with a
spectacular sunset, that served as the backdrop for the photo
of Darrel at the top of this page. We were then treated to the
combined effect of hundreds of vacationers up and down the
beach firing their own Fourth of July fireworks, along with
Destin’s professional display miles to the west.
Tuesday after lunch Stacey and I
accompanied James and Melinda on a sightseeing drive, and
somehow we wound up stopping and walking around a luxury
shopping area under development named the Village of Baytowne
Wharf. Later that afternoon Cait went with Stacey, the boys and
I to the Gulfarium, where we enjoyed a couple of fun shows with
dolphins and sea lions.
Tropical storm Cindy came ashore overnight,
and Wednesday morning the beaches were closed due to the strong
ocean waves. The beach was covered with brown seaweed brought
in by the storm. It was cloudy, windy and rainy, so most of us
went to the mall in the nearby town of Mary Esther.
That afternoon the sun came out and the
winds and waves grew even stronger, but it made for some
fantastic scenery. For dinner we all walked down the beach to a
nearby seafood restaurant, Pompano Joe’s, that had a view
of the ocean.
Every night I went to bed with the
intentions of getting up early the next morning to go take
sunrise photos somewhere. I finally overcame the power of the
ocean sounds on Thursday morning and drove out to a spot west
of the Destin bridge, but there wasn’t any color so I
just drove back to the beach house and went back to
snooze a couple more hours. After lunch the boys and I went for
a long drive up into the panhandle to hopefully check out some
the state’s springs and caves. The drive was longer than
I expected so we skipped the planned visit to Ponce De Leon
Spring and instead drove straight to Florida Caverns state
park.
On the drive back to the beach I got a call
on the cell phone from Stacey warning me to fill up the gas
tank before I got back into town. Word had spread along the
coast that Hurricane Dennis was on its way, and vacationers
were already leaving early and causing long lines at the gas
stations.
By Friday I’d had enough of hanging
out on the beach, and stayed indoors playing Monopoly with the
boys. The ocean was at its calmest that day, and I snapped the
picture below from our deck. By sundown most of the area
businesses were closed and were boarding up their windows.
After dinner, we all spent a while on the beach trying to take
family photos.
We packed before going to bed, so that we
could be on the road by 4 a.m. the next morning. Being caught
in a traffic jam sounded much scarrier than a hurricane! We
drove straight through and got back to Van Buren around 7 p.m.
Saturday. We watched Hurricane Dennis coverage on CNN the next
day.
