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
No comments:
Post a Comment