A few people have asked where Mexico Beach is, so here’s your answer: about 30 minutes southeast of Panama City on the Florida panhandle. It was a pretty quiet little town and the beaches weren’t too crowded, so all in all it was a great place to vacation. We finally got home on Saturday night after almost 13 hours in the car. It sounds long, and it was, but in the end it really wasn’t all that bad. We had originally planned to come home from Florida on Wednesday, then Thursday, and then we just decided to stay the whole week and enjoy ourselves!
On top of that, Jose’s mom and brother rode with us, so we got to enjoy an extra day with them at home yesterday. We drove straight through, but the rest of the family stopped in Baton Rouge on Saturday night, and one car stopped by yesterday afternoon to take them the rest of the way back to Corpus Christi. I didn’t actually take many photos in addition to the ones I shared a few days ago, but here are a few more:
Jose liked making sand creations. From left to right, he made a crab, a pelican, and a shark complete with shell teeth! Grr. I never saw any sharks, but they were plentiful. Jose’s uncle Mondo caught a few of them one day when he took the kayak out a few hundred yards off shore, and four family members even went on a shark fishing trip one evening (catch-and-release only). Fortunately, they were all small sharks. Not the kind that would bite your head off or anything. So that’s good, right??
All the little cousins had fun playing in the sand. One day, little Mac got buried and turned into a mermaid. As you can see in this photo, there was a 2-3 foot drop from the beach to where the water was. That was kinda weird to me.
There weren’t many restaurants around, but we still ate well. We had some yummy fried plantains and the best sweet potato fries ever (seriously, EVER — they were SO GOOD) at a place called Mango Marley’s. And we also liked the view of the beach from this deck at Toucan’s — so much that Jose and I actually ate there twice! They had some really tasty crab-and-shrimp cakes.
The condos we stayed in were about 50 yards from the beach — all we had to do was walk between the dunes and we were there. But we went horseback riding on a different beach about 30 minutes away, and they had this cool little boardwalk that led from a park full of pine trees down to the sand.
We stopped halfway through our horseback riding to get a group photo! We got discounts thanks to our condo rental, so at least 12 different people went horseback riding at one point or another over the course of the week. We were the first group to go — Jose, me, Alex, and cousin Chente. I rode the only girl horse, Marcy. (Jose was on Wiz, Alex was on Cowboy, and Chente rode Pork Chop. Love the names.) Marcy was great, but she wouldn’t walk in the water for anything. I kept trying to steer her over there to follow the other horses, but she stubbornly refused. I guess she didn’t want to get her tootsies wet.
Yesterday was Jose’s mom’s birthday, so we celebrated a few days early on our last night in Florida with a yummy chocolate cake. We managed to cook it despite an appalling lack of basic kitchen equipment in our condo. (Seriously, they didn’t even have a mixing bowl or cake pan. Or a usable skillet, so we had to buy one for the week!)
Although it was great to get home on Saturday, back to the comfort of our house and our own bed, it was a very fun week at the beach. Here’s the full Flickr set:
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Looks like a really fun trip.