Rosemary Beach, Seaside, and Destin

Saturday morning the house seemed rather quiet so we decided to head out for some sightseeing.  First we drove to Rosemary Beach where we had lunch outside at Wild Olives. 

The food is a bit pricey but very good.  Steve had a fancy hamburger, Helen had a pizza, and I had a roast beef sandwich.

Rosemary Beach is a summer resort kind of place with some shops and restaurants in addition to summer condos and cottages.  We walked around the main area after lunch.

This quaint little building is the post office.

We drove along the coast with Seaside as our next stop.  Do you remember the Truman Show where you could see what Jim Carrie did every minute?  That is Seaside with all the white picket fences.  I understand that they are required as part of the architecture.  The shopping area was also interesting.  There was a whole block of small airstream trailers that were serving food.  They don't look like they move around like they do in Austin.

We continued west along the coast.  One thing that was a little disappointing was that we could rarely see the beach and the ocean like we could when we went east along the coast to Apalachicola.  Here there were houses or cottages packed in.  There were quite a few state parks along our route; however, we didn't have time to stop and check them out.  What we could see from the road looked good. Hwy 30A joined back up to 98 near Destin.  One of the places advertised on our route was Gator Beach.  Good thing we had a GPS to find it.

Hmmm!  Not exactly what we imagined when we thought of Gator Beach.

Turns out that Gator Beach is a free alligator show in a restaurant/bar called Fudpuckers.  That's right; Fudpuckers not Fuddruckers.

 A guest from the audience was asked to help out with the show.

These are the celebrities.  The guy from the audience didn't get anywhere near these big boys.  They had a baby alligator that he touched and with whom he had his photo taken.

What the heck, it was free and you got to see them as close as I wanted to see them.  Headed back to Panama City and a little rainshower along the way.