This past weekend we headed to the beach for our 1st visit without adult supervision. Just one of the many perks of being married. Basically, we've been waiting 5 years for this so we were pretty excited. We headed down to the beach Thursday night after work and spent the whole weekend there. I have been telling Kyle for a long time how great the beach is during the fall (especially October). Do yourself a favor people. Go to the beach in October. Do it! I should pretty much work for the South Walton chamber of commerce because I'm big on advertising what a great time of year October is to go to the beach. Reasons for this being:
- The crowds are minimal which means you can actually eat at restaurants, go shopping and sit on the beach without having to fight off people.
- The water is absolutely gorgeous. I cannot describe to you the different shades of blue the water was this weekend and there were a TON of seashells on the beach.
- The weather is sooo nice. It was chilly in the mornings and evenings but I actually laid out Saturday afternoon...in my bathing suit. It is WAY better than spring break weather where you actually get more wind burned than sunburn. Been there done that.
Anyway, enough of the sales pitch. Needless to say, we enjoyed our (October) beach trip. We made plans to have "no plans" for the weekend (if this makes sense) and started our Friday with a visit to
Rosemary Beach.
It was nice being able to just walk around without an agenda. I also enjoyed all of the Halloween decor that was up.
After Rosemary we drove down the road to
Alys Beach where we did have plans to eat lunch one day at
George's. If you haven't been there I highly recommend going. We thought it was pretty good. They have a misbehave menu and a behave menu. We (of course) chose to misbehave. I got the fish tacos and Kyle got the grouper sandwich. Both were equally good.
Here is the entrance into Alys Beach
I've had friends that have inquired about this area of beach before so I thought I'd give another (brief) description. Between Panama City Beach and Destin, there is a scenic highway called 30-A. Along this highway are popular beach communities that have popped up over the years. Seaside is probably the most known and more popular but there are also areas like Rosemary Beach, Alys Beach, Seagrove, Grayton, Watercolor, Blue Mountain Beach, etc. You can distinguish a lot of the different communities by it's architecture/vibe. 30-A has become a pretty popular vacation spot and over the past few years.
After lunch we headed down 30-A, took in the sites and ended up in Sandestin at
Baytowne Wharf. Neither of us had been there in a really long time so we decided to check it out. Basically, the place was deadsville. I'm not sure if this was because it was a Friday or it is the fall but we were basically the only people there. The place had changed a lot since I was there for college spring breaks and my 21st birthday. I would only recommend this place now to those who have kids. There seemed to be a lot of activities geared toward the 7-15 year old crowd.
Late Friday afternoon we headed back to the beach house for naps then debated on where we should eat dinner. We decided on an oldie but goodie,
The Red Bar. I refuse to go there in the summer due to the crowds (2 hour waits are never fun) so a 30 minute wait was fine by me. We are glad we decided to eat there. The atmosphere is always energetic plus (in our opinion) the food is really good. I call it comfort food for the beach. I got their (famous) crab cakes and Kyle got the grouper special. We sat around after dinner, listened to the jazz band and people watched.
Red Bar decorated for Halloween
More of our beach adventures to come...
