Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Spring Training Trip - Day 20


We left Lafayette, LA in the fog about 8:00 am after filling up the RV with gas.  The local price is $3.43 per gallon today.  We never thought we would ever be considering that price to be a “bargain”.  There is something very wrong with this picture that is disturbing and needs to be fixed.

The fog pretty much lifted after we got beyond the bayous and through Baton Rouge, LA.  The skies remained cloudy and threatening however, and it finally started to rain around Mobile, AL and kept raining, not hard, until we got to Pensacola, FL.  We turned south from there then along the beach to Destin, FL, a resort town about 15 miles east of Fort Walton Beach in the Florida “Panhandle”.  The area has a lot of resort hotels, condominiums, and beach recreation related facilities.
 
The beaches are large with brilliant white sand and gentle waves.  Their recreation season here roughly runs from early-mid February to the end of October or into November.  Sort of a kick-off is Spring Break (usually corresponding with the Easter vacation) where thousands of college students from around the region descend on the area for beach time and other college-age related activities.  The beach and water recreation continues through the summer under lots of sunshine and warm (sometimes very hot) temperatures. The weather when we arrived around 3:30 pm was cool (high 50’s) and overcast; nobody was swimming or sunbathing on the beach.

We are staying at Henderson Beach State Park, just east of Destin. The park has 60 RV sites and numerous tent sites.  The RV sites all have electric and water hook-ups. Our site is a pull through with barrier vegetation on all sides, a picnic table and a fire pit, just a short walk to the beach. The park is one of Florida’s most popular state parks and is generally booked all year except for November thru February.  Reservations can be made 11 months in advance and usually all the sites are taken.

Our plans for the night are to eat out at McGuire’s Irish Pub, a popular local and tourist hangout.  We ate there before on our previous trip through town and it is worth a return visit.  It will then be early to bed for, hopefully, a good night’s sleep.

We have a short 2½ hour drive tomorrow to our next stop, St. Georges Island State Park, so we are going to sleep in and maybe take a walk on the beach before leaving. 
Pictures will be posted tomorrow, so check back if you can.


(Day 20 - Continued)

We did go to McGuire’s Irish Pub for dinner and had a great meal.  The place was packed and we had about a 15 minute wait to get a table.  This restaurant/bar drips with ambience and has lots of “Irish things” throughout.  There is also an attached gift shop with an extensive collection of wines for sale.  They additionally make their own beer which is very good.  They had live music – an Irish sounding singer playing Irish ditties on a guitar. 

Another feature of the pub is literally thousands of $1.00 bills with messages written on them pasted on the walls and ceiling.  A special section of the restaurant has framed pictures of military servicemen, mostly pilots, with a dollar bill and message in each frame along with the picture.  As the pub is very close to the two nearby Air Force bases – Eglin AFB and Hurlburt AFB, and not too far away from Pensacola NAS, a major U.S. Naval Aviation Base, it is frequently visited by military servicemen, many who appeared to be there last night.  There were also pictures of celebrities and sports stars who visited the pub and left autographed pictures and dollar bills with messages. 

The pub also serves their homemade bean soup for $0.18 a cup if you buy something else to go with it.  The story goes that when the soup was invented in the 1800’s, it was served to U.S. Congressmen in their cafeteria for $0.18.  I missed the connection on why the pub has continued the tradition and the same price, but the soup was excellent and it is a clever marketing gimmick.

Day 20 Pictures

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