MEMORY MAKING: LET’S GET BEACHY
This vacation had two compelling reasons. The first, the longstanding promise to visit friends in the Pensacola area and the second, $1200 in airfare from Southwest. Come along and enjoy this trip to Florida!
Welcome to P-Cola
When you get bumped from a flight and the airline hands you a voucher for $1200, you figure out before you get home where you’re going with it. We’d been promising Ken & Iliana for years that we’d visit them in the Pensacola area, but something always seemed to get in our way. There were no excuses now and Bill told me to book it.
There was a another factor. While I’m not all that crazy about the beach, Bill loves it. He muses of a beach place we could make ours. He’d been suggesting the Destin area to me for awhile, but I was not sold.
In fact, I’d researched a Florida vacation back in 2022 and ended up at Club Med’s Sandpiper Bay instead of Destin. Destin just seemed like a crowded mess to me and so I sold him the all-inclusive resort based on the fun we’d had at Club Med Punta Cana a few years before.
It was on the trip to Sandpiper Bay that we decided to sell our real estate photography, because there was really no vacation to it. We’d just managed the business from a different location. Still, we did enough at Sandpiper Bay to know it wasn’t going to be our beachy place. Destin was still on the table and I still thought it was a crowded mess.
So, I sold him another vacation package – time with our friends on Lost Perdido Key and then some time on our own at Navarre Beach, because it is right around the corner from Destin and not so expensive. SOLD! Soon, the flight attendant was announcing we were landing in P-Cola! Yippee!!
Thrifty Isn’t Nifty at PNS
Bill thinks I don’t know how to get the best deal on a rental car and that’s fine with me, because that means he books them. He was quite proud of the great deal he found with Thrifty for this trip. At least he was until he got to the airport and discovered Thrifty did not have a desk in the airport or a shuttle from the airport. His great deal made us find an Uber to get to their remote location and our driver was Mr. Chatty Cathy. Having run into this hitch, which was his fault and was costing us money, Mr. Bill was not in the mood for Mr. Chatty Cathy. After basically telling Mr. CC to shut up, it was a bit of a tense drive for the rest of the drive.
However, we did get a decent car and Bill convinced them to let him return the car to the airport rather than the remote site, so it as a mere hiccup along the road to a fun time. Getting to Lost Perdido Key was a little tricky, but soon I was hugging my great friend and having an aperitif on her condo’s patio. No complaints here.
Lost Perdido Key Beach Club for Drinks & Coastal for Dinner
Moss never grows around my feet when I am with Iliana. We’d barely caught our breath from our travels when she loaded us into the car and took us to her Beach Club. After a drink there, she loaded us up in the car again and we went to dinner up the road. Coastal at Orange Beach was a beautiful restaurant. The food was great and the service, too.
We had plans to see the Blue Angels the next morning and you are going to love that, so join me next week.
jane sadek 