Roadtripping

Road trip attraction: Don't throw your rolls at me!

I passed this Lambert’s Café in Foley, Alabama, today. If you wonder why its website is throwedrolls.com, it’s because a member of the wait staff walks around with a basket of dinner rolls and will throw one at you if you want a roll with your meal. I ate at the original in Sikeston., Mo., a few years ago and found no charm in having rolls thrown at me. I'm apparently in the minority, however, since Lambert's baked -- and presumably threw -- 2.2 million rolls last year. As far as I know, the roll-throwing Lamberts are no relation. My branch of the Lambert family has a dominant clumsiness gene. We can't catch.

 

Road Trip: Margaritaville on Pensacola Beach

I’m in Pensacola Beach, sitting on my enormous bed and watching the Gulf of Mexico waves pound the sand.  It’s early Monday morning and there’s a lone woman doing stretching exercises at the tide line and letting the fading ripples of the waves wash her feet. If there’s noise, I can’t hear it above the roar of the ocean coming through the open door to my balcony.

I’m staying at Margaritaville, Jimmy Buffett’s hotel, which opened not quite two years ago.  I wanted a view of the water, and when I made my online reservations (about 30 minutes before I got to the hotel, after I'd surveyed the other hotels on this resort strip), I settled for a bayfront room for $149. But Sunday is a quiet night, and the front desk clerk upgraded me to an ocean front room, $199 if I had reserved it online. (The hotel staff doesn’t know that I’m a travel writer, and I’ve set up this post to go live after I’ve checked out.)

I love the room. It’s big and airy with kind of a Key West décor – a small mural of the ocean, Bahamas shutters, faux-plank flooring like a deck, seashell light fixtures and other beach items. It’s got a small refrigerator, robes, a coffeemaker, free Wi-Fi, enough outlets to plug in all my gadgets for recharging at once, and a newspaper at my door this morning.

Last night I had a crabcake sandwich at the Frank and Lola Love Pensacola Café off the lobby. It was almost 10 p.m., and the hostess hesitated when I asked if the restaurant was still serving, but she was happy to seat me at the bar and handed me the menu. I ended up chatting with a young couple on a meandering trip back home from Biloxi to north Georgia who, like me, had decided on an impulse to stay here.

Back in my room, I stood on the balcony and stared into the dark, the ripples of white foam barely distinguishable.  I love the sound of waves crashing on the beach and thought about leaving my balcony door open, but the sound isn’t gentle – it’s a roar that would keep me awake.

Now it’s check-out time and I’m tempted to condense my sightseeing plans and stay another night – the ocean is mesmerizing – but Alabama calls.

 

Road trip attractions: The Panhandle's beaches

Florida's Panhandle has some amazing beaches, and I spent Sunday wandering through some of them. These are beaches of white sand that is fine and soft. The waves are bigger and noisier than anything we see in South Florida -- unless a hurricane is approaching. Two of the three that I visited are state parks with expansive camping areas and walking trails where park rangers have made an effort to teach the public about some aspect of nature.

St. Andrews, near Panama City Beach, had the most traditional beach of the three, long and medium-wide, with boardwalks that allow beach-goers to cross the dunes without damaging them. The temperature was in the low 80s, and the sand was crowded with people young and old. In the water, people surfed and kite-boarded.

Next to the St. Andrews campground, pelicans have claimed this jetty for themselves.

Grayton State Park, not quite halfway between Panama City and Pensacola, has a coastal dune lake. The white sand on the dunes is so stark that it looks more like borax deposits at Death Valley than beach sand. On Sunday, a brisk wind blew in late afternoon, chasing some people off the beach, erasing footprints in the sand, and raising faint white clouds at the far ends of the beach. By the time I got back to my car, I felt the fine grit in my mouth and my hair.

It was close to sunset when I walked the length of the Navarre Beach fishing pier, not far east of Pensacola. The pier opened just under two years ago, and at 1,545 feet, claims to be the longest in Florida.

The pier bristled with fishing poles, some anglers working three or four of them at a time. The big catch of the day appeared to be king mackerel.

I could hear cheering before I reached the end of the pier, and when I got there, I found out why. A boy of 8 or 10 years had landed a big mackerel by himself. As I got there, an angler with a portable scale determined the fish weighed 32 pounds. The boy might have weighed 60 or 70 pounds.

As I walked back down the pier, everyone I passed was talking about the little boy and his big fish. The news had traveled fast, reinvigorating the conversation -- and the efforts of the other anglers. As I stood at the rail, observing life on the pier, the boy angler walked by with his dad and little brother and an entourage besides, the boy and his dad proudly carrying – and sometimes dragging -- the prize mackerel.