Florida Family Beach Trip and a Confession

The first place I ever traveled as a kid was to the Florida Panhandle for beach vacations with my family. Where I grew up in South Mississippi, everyone goes to the Panhandle for vacation. It’s where my parents went to the beach as teenagers. (It’s where they first decided they liked each other.) It’s where I have some of my earliest memories. It’s where I went every summer with my aunt, uncle, and cousins from late elementary school through high school. I know people who go to the Panhandle for every vacation and holiday, multiple times each year. They pick between Gulf Shores (technically Alabama, but close enough), Pensacola, Fort Walton, Destin, Panama City, or a few smaller places in between. And a thing I grew to learn over 18 years of going to these places every summer is that… I don’t love the beach in the summer. That’s right. I said it. I don’t love being hot and sticky. I don’t love sand sticking to my sunscreen. I can’t sit in the direct sun for more than 30 seconds without turning the color of cooked lobster. I think the ocean is beautiful, and I love watching/hearing the waves, but I vastly prefer doing so at sunrise or sunset as I take a brief walk down the beach in between snacks. The people who can sit for endless hours on the beach (my sister and dad) are BAFFLING to me. Don’t you get bored? Don’t you feel like you’re melting? (To be clear, I welcome any and all invites to foreign beach locations! I enjoy beach-adjacent activities and food and views! I will even take a brief swim with you if I’m feeling bold and the water isn’t too cold. Just don’t ask me to sit on the sand with you for 10 hours.)

And as I got older, Fort Walton and Destin, our most frequented Panhandle destinations, started to change. What had once been cute started to feel tacky to me. The souvenir shops full of air-brushed t-shirts and captive hermit crabs used to feel like treasure troves until the hermit crabs started to make me feel sad. The 6 lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic alongside the beach was never-ending. The food at the beach restaurants doubled in price and then decreased in quality. And then a decade passed when I didn’t go to the Florida Panhandle, and I didn’t miss it.

During the pandemic, my family decided to take a small trip together for the first time in years. We all live in different places and hadn’t been able to see each other much during lockdown, and planning a trip gave us something to look forward to. We needed an affordable place within easy driving distance, so the Florida Panhandle seemed like the obvious choice even though it wasn’t my preference. Instead of going to our usual Florida destination, my sister suggested somewhere on highway 30A near Seaside, a trendy place in the Panhandle I’d never been to. This was May of 2021, and we’d all just been vaccinated. We quarantined for a couple of weeks before tentatively emerging from our cocoons and heading to the condo we rented in Blue Mountain Beach. And it could not have been more different than Destin. In 30A, the main road has two lanes and a speed limit so low that a lot of people drive golf carts instead of cars. There are no high-rise condos or hotel chains or chain restaurants. Everything is meticulously curated, color-coordinated, manufactured, and upscale in a way that made me feel that I couldn’t afford to breathe the air there. It was beautiful and peaceful, but there was something lacking there—authenticity, maybe. Diversity. Character. But the condo we rented was cheap (thanks to Covid and going before Memorial Day) and on the beach, and it was wonderful to get to be with my family again. I had a great time, but I remember hoping that if we tried to start this trip as a new family tradition, maybe we could go somewhere new the following year. There are too many new places to explore to take identical vacations multiple times, I reasoned.

I didn’t know that the next year, my mom would be going through cancer treatment. We didn’t know if she’d be able to travel anywhere at all, but she wanted to try, and so the next May, the beach was still the obvious and easiest choice. We stayed in the same room as the previous year because under the circumstances, it was nice to know what to expect. My mom was limited in what she could do, and we were even more Covid-cautious than we had been in 2021. We spent a lot of time in the condo together, and we celebrated Mother’s Day there. We felt lucky to even get to be together at all.

This year we debated for a while about where to go and talked about trying something new. I had recently returned from Europe when we started planning the trip, and I spent hours daydreaming about how to convince my family that a trip to Mexico or Central America would be an alternative we could make happen (The chances of everyone agreeing to this were 0%, but one can dream!). But ultimately, most people voted for the short drive and convenience. And so it was decided that we’d head to 30A again. My only stipulation as the appointed trip planner was that this time, I’d find us a new place to rent that allowed dogs so that I could bring Chewie, because an elderly lady who may have never had a beach vacation deserves one in her golden years. Everyone agreed.

And so, a few weeks ago we went on our third annual beach trip. And a thing I’ve logically known all along but felt more fully this time is that it really doesn’t matter much where we go. It doesn’t matter if it’s the same vacation or if I don’t care much about sitting on the beach or if it’s not the place I’d choose to vacation on my own. Those things aren’t relevant. A trip like this one isn’t about the destination at all—it’s just about being together and away from the responsibilities of normal life. It’s about feeling gratitude that my mom felt back to her normal self this year, and that 16-year-old Chewie got to ride a golf cart and touch ocean waves for the first time, and that my 6-year-old niece, Lily, got to sleep on the top bunk of a bunk bed for the first time, which was the thrill of her life. It’s about stopping to get glazed pecans at Buc-ee’s gas station on the way AND on the way home. It’s about how there were bikes in the shed that Michael and I got to ride, and how insane the tiny crabs look when they scurry along the shoreline at night.

And in these past 3 years, 30A has grown on me, and I’m full of recommendations if you’d like them. Sundog Books is one of my absolute favorite bookstores ever, and it alone is worth a trip to Florida. Stinky’s Fish Camp has incredible food, but even better is that they sell bags of turtle food so you can walk down the boardwalk and toss food to the long-necked turtles that look like dinosaurs in the lake. The farmer’s market in Rosemary Beach is adorable, and La Crema Tapas in Rosemary has cookies that are embarrassingly expensive but so delicious that you will forget how much you paid (almost). Black Bear Bread Company in Grayton Beach is a wonderful bakery where I could eat every meal. The entire stretch of 30A spans 18 miles, and it is worth bringing a bicycle so you can bike all 11 miles of it and eat cookies at cafes along the way. And though I plot the faraway destinations I hope to bring my family to one day, if they want to be here, I’m happy to be here, too.