A pelican’s paradise

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Destin, FL – Exploring a place with Scott and Mary Jane is a treat, because they have an eye for the unique and interesting, and love to share their enthusiasm with their friends. This is the third time they’ve spent time in Destin, so they’ve scouted out a lot of neat places, and we saw some of them today.

We kept the gulf on our right the whole way out, as we headed eastward on Scenic Highway 98 and then Highway 30A. This route took us through a chain of beachside communities, each with distinctive characters and interesting things to see. We passed at least three state parks, some of which offer camping for RVers, as well as nature trails accessible by rented bicycle or waterways by kayak.

Along with lots of natural beauty, we also saw a wide range of manmade sights, equally appealing to the eye. While many beachside condos toward the western end are in highrise buildings, at the eastern end where we were today, they are in townhouses on a smaller scale. Stately palm trees line the streets, lawns are manicured and green and other landscaping is set off from the grass with skirts of bleached shells.

We stopped at a small bakery our friends had found with a specialty of buttery, fragrant cinnamon buns – and even found four of them in the day-old bin, which were still light and delicious, plus at half price. Outside the bakery were rows of pastel-coloured bicycles for rent, and next door to it was a health food store with shelves loaded with interesting soaps, herbal medicines and giant oatmeal-raisin cookies.

Still licking cinnamon from our fingers, we parked the car and headed for another beautiful stretch of beach to test our new waterproof sandals and drink in the fresh breeze, foaming surf and comical plovers scampering over the dunes. We kept a brisk walking pace to stay warm, as it was not a hot day, although the sun was shining brightly for a change.

One of the communities we passed through, Seaside, had been used as the set for the movie The Truman Show, where Jim Carey lived an ideal life in a perfect town called Seahaven. Its manicured streets and bright, trim houses still look as utopian as ever!

A cluster of high-end boutiques and restaurants in Sandestin, another town in the chain, stood next to Choctawatchee Bay, where a boardwalk pier invited us out by a marina filled with expensive-looking yachts, and a pair of pelicans sailed overhead and dive-bombed into the water after a fish dinner, over and over again! We passed several people who had been fishing and were taking home some substantial-looking catches to cook up for supper, so the pelicans were in the right neighbourhood.

By this time, we were ready for supper too, so we retraced our steps back to the condo and enjoyed another pleasant evening of good food and good conversation.

[Note to faithful readers: we will be without wi-fi connections for the next two nights, as we’re booked in at a state park in Pensacola, so it will be a couple of days before we can post the next blogs.]