Day 15 – Destin, Florida

There was no rush to set off today as we had only a relatively short hop to Destin in Florida ahead of us. The day was pleasantly warm and cloudless. After a last check to ensure that I had my passport this time (and hadn’t been given the passport of Mr Hagleshaw) we were on our way. The satnav took us by a bewildering series of County roads with low speed limits but we made good progress.

The deceased-armadillo-of-the-day made its appearance at the 45 mile mark but we saw no more alligators today. It being Sunday in Alabama, the airwaves seemed to have been taken over by religious broadcasting and the only non-religious (or at least not too overtly religious) station we could find was the “Country Top 40 on 98.9”. This turned out to be a dismal collection of songs about painful separations, trucks failing to start, dogs dying and the inevitable bar stools. In desperation we tried the jazz CD that we had both bought off a group of street musicians in New Orleans but this turned out to be 12 tracks that sounded like variations on the same tune with the same backing track playing. We finally settled on the playlist from Mark’s iPod, which, while it probably reveals more about his state of mind than I would ordinarily care to know, at least contained some tunes that one could hum along to. We stopped briefly to swap over the driving at a rather nice wooded rest area somewhere about half way.

We made good progress overall, didn’t need to stop for gas, and got to Destin around 1pm. Check-in wasn’t officially till 4 but they found us a room straight away. The place we are staying is a Best Western hotel in the middle of a vast retail park.  Along with the Cat Clinics there was a place that was intriguingly offering “Free Smells” – we decided that we get enough of those in our room each morning and swiftly moved on.

We dropped our stuff off and headed for the beach. It was disappointing to find that the public beach turned out to be a strip about 20m wide between two private beaches. However its possible to walk along the sea shore on the private beaches provided you don’t have the temerity to try to take more than a few steps inland. This walk led to a much larger public beach where we stopped and even had a little swim in the sea. I suspect there may be some local ordinance prohibiting men of our age from wearing swimming trunks but we seemed to get away with it on this occasion. 

Following all this exercise in 80 degree plus heat we were badly in need of  rehydration and took ourselves off to Millers Ale House for some well-earned refreshment. 

After that it was all downhill, we went back to the hotel for a shower and then back out to find some food. As it’s Mother’s Day here, the restaurants were all doing a roaring trade but we managed to get a table at the Outback Steakhouse, where for once we didn’t overdo the seafood.  However Mark managed to procure an lobster tail to go with his steak and I had shrimps with mine. For perhaps the first day since the trip began we didn’t have oysters!

After that we had a couple of glasses of wine at another bar and staggered back to the hotel. Our next (and final) stop before we return to New Orleans is Biloxi which is about 170 miles along  the coast in Mississippi.