The family spent Wednesday in Pensacola, enjoying one last trip to the Pensacola MESS Hall before they close for the school year. After our time at the MESS Hall, we looked for an inexpensive — but not fast-food — lunch option. There are typically numerous restaurants along Gregory St. near the Civic Center and we … Read more
Steve’s Farm is in Walnut Hill, Florida, just below Atmore, Alabama (home of Wind Creek Casino).
This past Saturday the family headed to the northwest corner of Florida for some catfish fishing. I know that sounds strange, hauling so far up north when we have amazing fishing all around us, right?
We’re first heard about Steve’s Farm through our Cub Scout pack, they had an outing up to the farm earlier this spring. We had other plans on that day, but we had promised the kids a trip up to the farm. Especially since Timmy had won a brand new Shakespeare fishing rod and reel as a door prize from the May Cub Scout meeting.
The farm is about an 90 minute drive from our house in Navarre. It’s run by a Mennonite family and everyone who helped us out was so incredibly nice.
Tucked away in the middle of nowhere, Morrison Springs Park is a jewel of a spot near Defuniak Springs. It’s a very popular freshwater snorkeling and scuba-diving location.
After nearly two weeks straight of having steamy-hot mornings and thunderstormy afternoons, it was time to simply take a gamble and head outside on a day trip.
This is the time of year in northwest Florida when the Gulf of Mexico water temperatures get so warm, trips to the beach become somewhat unpleasant. Even swimming pools aren’t cutting it. Many folks will head north towards places like the Blackwater River to legitimately cool off.
A fellow AF spouse shared a recent trip she took to Morrison Springs, a county park about 75 miles east-north-east of Navarre, and about 10 miles east of Defuniak Springs, not far off I-10. It looked very interesting. The cold water certainly caught my attention. Today I decided to pack a lunch, our swim tubes and swim noodles and headed out with the kids. None of us knew what to expect. I warned them that if the place was icky enough, we’d turn right around and I’d take them to a cool lunch spot for their trouble…but it was quite nice.
I could have sworn I had heard about the Pensacola MESS Hall from the Pensacola With Kids blog, but I can’t find the reference article. Oh well.
Trust me when I say that I had first heard about it through Pensacola With Kids, but I can’t find the original review now. But what I did find was this story in the Pensacola Digest that came out not long after the facility opened in June.
The MESS Hall is in downtown Pensacola just a block off Palafox Street near the center square. After spending time here, the family can adjourn to a nice dinner nearby.
The MESS Hall has attempted to capture the feeling of a traditional mess hall, which is a military term for where servicemembers eat on the base or on their ships. The kids will walk in (after paying the $5 per person admission), and are greeted with a open space with tables and assorted areas for free play with wind tunnels, marble run parts and pendulums. The walls are covered in posters featuring optical illusions.
Last weekend we took advantage of another Groupon: $35 parasailing with Destin Parasailing. By buying two for “myself” and gifting two more to Dave (per the terms of the Groupon), we were able to swing $35 parasailing for the whole family!
We were scheduled for last Saturday, but due to poor weather, we rescheduled to this past Sunday and the weather was fantastic!
You can read more details about a parasailing experience here from our trip last year, but with the kids we were really happy they enjoyed it. There was another 7-year-old on our boat and she was much more high-strung. She went up before our boys did, and she shrieked and hollered most of the time. We didn’t know if she was happy or sad about the experience. When she came back, she seemed to be giggling, but then said “It was scary!”. So I was nervous that the kids might get nervous themselves.
Today we took the kids parasailing (new blog post coming soon!) and we used the same business, Olin Marler Fishing Service, that we did for the deep sea fishing earlier this month. So when we were checking in, Jacob pointed out that Dave and I were in one of the pictures in the window. This … Read more
I’ll refrain from the more gory pictures of chum and cigar minnows with their eyes stabbed out, ha ha. But here’s the boat’s catch. There were 10 of us fishing, so we each were allowed to take home two red snapper and many other kinds of fish as well. Dave’s biggest red snapper catch is on the farthest right of the top row, and my lesser amberjack is right next to it.
Yep, I’m quite a bit behind, but I wanted to share Dave’s and my latest Florida adventure.
While the kids were in the northeast visiting with the grandparents, on July 3rd we booked a half-day (6 hour) fishing trip out on the Gulf of Mexico. We had SO MUCH FUN (yes, I’m shouting this).
Our boat, the Gulf Breeze.
We chose Olin Marler Charter Boat service for our trip, since that’s the same company we used for our dolphin cruise in April. The Marler name is a fixture in Destin: “Uncle Billy” Marler was one of the founders of Destin and served as the fishing village’s first postmaster. The founding families’ names are everywhere in Destin: street names, company names and even tied into the names of the boats.
Olin Marler offers several options for deep sea fishing trips: the “party boat” which holds more people on the boat but costs less, the group charter: a smaller boat experience that accepts an assortment of smaller parties, and the truly private charter, where a single group pays for the full cost of the boat trip, regardless of how many people are in the group.
We chose the middle option, since we didn’t want the chaos of a large group but weren’t about to pay for a full boat all to ourselves. Our group charter was able to accomodate up to 30 people on board, but there were only 10 of us. It felt very fortunate to not be on such a crowded boat.
Dave and I took a drive on Saturday. It’s something we hadn’t done in YEARS — as the kids get older they don’t really have the patience to just sit in the car and enjoy the scenery. We got into the Mustang, put the top down and headed eastward!
Much of what I had written about Florida recently has been in areas around Pensacola and Destin. Unfortunately, there is so much congestion in Destin, we rarely get to go east.
So many blueberries, but only one me to eat them all!
I made plans with a neighborhood friend, Sandra, to go blueberry picking. I had friended A&N Blueberry Farm on Facebook earlier this spring and watched their page for when they’d be opening. Last Thursday (while our older sons were in school) we drove all the way up to the town of Molino, Florida (about an hour away) and when we got to A&N, the farm was closed. I mean, really CLOSED!
A sign was taped to the locked gate:
Due to unforeseen circumstances we will be closing the blueberry patch until further notice. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes. Please monitor our website for any further information. Please don’t judge our decision.
Pensacola went without a minor league baseball team for a season while this ballpark was under construction. This the Blue Wahoos' inaugural season.
After a day of the boys playing baseball, we headed out to downtown Pensacola for an evening with the Pensacola Blue Wahoos — the city’s brand new AA Minor League baseball team. They had a team called the Pelicans until 2010, but for summer 2011, there was no professional baseball in the area. We’re excited to have a team to watch locally now.
There was a Scout parade at 6pm but we didn’t get to the park in time. Instead, we chose to stop for dinner.
The park isn’t that big, it seats 5,000 people, so there weren’t really poor seats anywhere. We were at the very end of the first base line…which still gave us a good view of the game itself, but we could barely see the scoreboard. Jacob, our statistics boy, was trying to track the speeds of the pitches.
