Destin

Destin Harbor. East pass and the Gulf of Mexico to the right. Town of Destin to the left.

Destin, Florida has been a popular vacation destination for New Orleanians for generations. I was so young when I first visited that I don't remember it, but suffice it to say that we probably arrived in something like a 1959 Pontiac when the interstate system was still a gleam in Eisenhower's eye. Back then it was indeed a "sleepy fishing village," on the outskirts of which were a couple of small motels and the Silver Beach cottages. The outskirts at the time were barely half a mile from the edge of town, which itself was basically a one mile stretch along US 98 overlooking the well-protected Destin harbor on one side and Choctawatchee Bay to the north. We would return there many times over the succeeding years, sometimes in the middle of summer, but more often around Easter vacation time. By the time I finished high school there were a couple more hotels, including a modern-looking Holiday Inn, but beyond that to the east were miles and miles of untouched sand dunes and pristine beaches with the finest, whitest sand you will ever find on planet earth. As a result, I have been terribly disappointed with virtually every other beach I've ever visited. After high school graduation a few friends and I drove to Destin towing my "ski boat" with I think a 40 hp outboard and spend three or four days water skiing in the deserted eastern end of the harbor. Soon thereafter the entire area was discovered by developers, originally from Dallas, and things started to change. A little later the Hilton operation bought a huge tract of land in the adjacent county to the east, co-opted the name of the city, and established the "Sandestin" resort.

There was rain.

Today most of the dunes around the city are long gone, replaced by high-rise condominiums and the shell road down by the harbor is basically a carnival boardwalk. Thus, my trips to Destin are always a little bittersweet. This trip, in fact, wasn't really to Destin itself but to the Tops'l resort just to the east of the Hilton. At nearly ten miles from Destin itself, it represents the eastern edge of "development."  Fortunately the old 4-mile Village remains mostly intact as a buffer and residential community nestled among the high dunes to the east, providing the only glympse of how things used to be closer to Destin before the bulldozers moved in.

Sand beaches do not get better than this.

Anyway, despite a less than encouraging weather forecast I clamped the old Orbea to the roof of the car and we headed east on Friday for a little vacation. My penance for this particular luxury would be missing the age-graded road championships in St. Francisville, so I was determined to get in a few miles while I was there, even if it meant riding in the rain. This is not really the greatest place to ride a bike.  Highway 98 is to be avoided at all costs, and Old 98 is narrow and full of vacationers and hotel and restaurant staff. Over the years I've worked out a reasonably safe approach to riding when I'm there.  The key thing, of course, is to hit the road early - somewhere in the 6:30 -7:00 am timeframe - before the tourists start looking for donuts and coffee. There's a mile or so along 98 in a narrow bike lane before crossing over to "old 98" which of course was highway 98 before the built the 4-lane "new 98" mainly to service the Hilton.

Beach people

New 98 is now a practically unbroken six or seven miles of chain restaurants and retail operations, including a big outlet mall. Fortunately a few of the restaurants aren't bad. When the created the New 98, they closed off a section of the old highway to create a little park, which was probably just an excuse to make it impossible to take the old more scenic highway instead of the new one. For cyclists that means you can take old 98 most of the way to Destin, but then must cross over new 98. For a few years, I had to ride a couple of miles on the new highway, but now the retail developments alongside the highway have their own little winding service road, complete with the required traffic circles, speed bumps, and faux-brick pedestrian crosswalks. On the plus side, it's not too bad of a ride and makes it easy to get into Destin proper. Once in Destin, I do a couple of out-and-back type laps along the bay side of town where, thankfully, things have not really changed all that much.  There are a number of modern homes along Indian Bayou Road, and a couple of real mansions on Bayou Road, but a lot of the older houses are the little cinder-block type houses that were always there and that remind me of the kinds of houses that military personnel retired into. Indeed, there are a lot of retired military in Destin thanks to its proximity to Eglin AFP and Hurlbert Field.

Looking west toward Destin

So bright and early Saturday morning I headed out for Destin, eventually logging around 50 miles. The rest of the day was rainy and I just hung around the very nice condo suite while the girls "went to the grocery" which ultimately took them about five hours since there were so many retail outlets to explore.  I was extremely thankful I'd decided not to go with them.  Sunday morning started out looking pretty nice, but I was only five or six miles out when the first little rain shower came through. Somewhere in Destin that turned into a pretty significant thunderstorm.  I was of course drenched and riding through semi-flooded streets, but the temperature was still warm and I had my rear blinky light, so I did pretty much the same ride I'd done the day before. The rest of that day was fairly rainy, of course, but not too bad. We went into Grayton Beach for dinner at the old restaurant there where the food was mediocre at best, the service inexperienced, and the prices painfully high. Oh well.

Danielle and Shannon

Finally on Monday the weather was a little better. I pulled on my still-wet shoes and did another repeat of the 50-mile ride I'd done the previous two days. The only notable riding incident was a rather embarrassing fall I took right in front of the condo when I was heading out one morning. As I clipped in with my right foot, my left foot slipped on the brightly painted concrete and I fell like a sack of rocks right on my lower back, still clipped into the pedal.  Unfortunately for me this happened right in front of a family that was loading up a car. They thought I'd killed myself, of course.  My only thought was to smile, say I was OK, and get the heck out of there as quickly as possible. My back still hurts. Anyway, the rest of Monday was fairly sunny and windy, so I spent much of it hiding under an umbrella on the beach.  It was a little too rough and full of seaweed to make swimming very appealing, and years and years of bad experience have taught me it's not worth getting sunburned on a three-day vacation.

So it was a pretty nice break over Labor Day weekend, and I was pretty good about avoiding the non-essential work emails. Naturally that means I'll be pretty swamped for the next few days while I attempt to catch up.