Wowsa. What a day!
Not one lighthouse. Two.
Two Lighthouses, One Epic Day
The Gulf Coast
Bonita Springs, Bradenton, and Steinhatchee — Moving Through Florida
Not every stop on a road trip is a destination.
Some stops are just… the road.
Panama City Beach — Three Nights on the Gulf
After the busyness of the holiday coast, we needed to exhale.
Panama City Beach was just the place.
Pensacola Lighthouse, 165 Years and Still Shining
Not every lighthouse is easy to get to.
We’d come east to Gulf Shores, but the Pensacola Lighthouse pulled us back west. Forty minutes back into Florida. Worth every mile.
The lighthouse sits inside Naval Air Station Pensacola. You have to enter the base to reach it.
Gulf Shores — Wildlife, Bikes, and a Beachful of Shells
Gulf Shores surprised us.
In the best possible way.
Fort Morgan, History at the Tip of Mobile Point
Right at the tip of a long, narrow peninsula — where Mobile Bay meets the Gulf of Mexico — sits Fort Morgan.
It’s been there since 1833.
A Lunch Stop That Became a Highlight: Mobile, Alabama
We weren’t planning to fall for Mobile.
It was supposed to be a lunch stop, a place to break up the drive from Gulf Shores,AL to Bay St. Louis, MS. But the ferry from Fort Morgan to Dauphin Island was down for maintenance, so we had to drive through Mobile anyway.
Buccaneer State Park — Gulf of Mexico
Just south of Bay St. Louis, MS, hugging the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, is Buccaneer State Park in Waveland.
We went in the afternoon. And the light made the difference.
Four Hours in New Orleans
Four hours.
That’s all we had in New Orleans. Just over an hour from Bay St. Louis, so we made an afternoon of it.
Bay St. Louis, Mississippi — Slow Days on the Gulf
We didn’t come to Bay St. Louis to see the sights.
We came to rest. And the town was perfectly fine with that.