The Emerald Coast

From Destin to Pensacola, the Gulf Coast today offers attractions from the sea to the skies.

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It’s a windy day in Destin Harbor. Hundreds of boats bob at their berths as crew members work to catch up on maintenance and deferred chores. In a few short weeks, there won’t be time to touch up the paint and replace worn out equipment.

“It starts to pick up March 1,” says George. “Last spring break it was phenomenal.”

For 17 years he worked as a crew member on the American Spirit, the largest fishing charter in Destin. Now he mans the docks, booking trips for people who want to get a taste of the “Luckiest Fishing Village” in the world. As the weather warms, these boats will be out in the Gulf of Mexico for up to 12 hours a day. “If they’re going to go on a boat, mine’s top-notch,” says George. “I’ve got the absolute best mates in this town. They treat everybody with respect. My favorite spots are right on the bow, or midship on the starboard side.”

George grew up in nearby Fort Walton. He’s had a front-row seat to Destin’s explosive growth. “I’m a true local,” he says. “This was a one-horse town for many years. I hardly ever came over here in my younger days.”

The Most Romantic Spot on the Beach

It’s not a one-horse (one-seahorse?) town any more. Destin used to be an afterthought, a place to drive by on the way down Highway 98 from Pensacola to Panama City. Now, it’s a major tourist destination and a favorite spot for Memphians when they’re in the mood for a beach vacation. If you’re driving with the kids in tow, you can be dipping your toes in the ocean in less than eight hours. If you’re flying into Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport, you can get here about twice as fast. (Unfortunately, there’s no direct flight, which would cut down the transit time considerably.)

The powers that be are backing away from using “The Emerald Coast” in official branding, but the view at Henderson Beach State Park shows why the moniker has stuck. Where the flawless white sand slips beneath the waves, the ocean is a translucent green. To get a feel for what this area used to be like, you can camp in the middle of the 200-acre park of rolling dunes and scrub grasses. Or, if you’re the kind of person who thinks “camping” means “staying in a hotel room without a coffee maker,” you can stay in unaccustomed luxury at the Henderson Park Inn.

The Inn was built on this idyllic beach about the same time the Henderson family gifted their property to the State of Florida in the early 1980s. The original developers, brothers Bill and Steve Abbott, worked at their uncle’s inn in Maine during their teenage summers. They built the Henderson Park Inn in the same New England style. A second building just to the east of the original was built in 1992. “They have both been allowed to weather over the years to give them an appearance of being built in an earlier era,” says Janie Schmidt, the Inn’s marketing director.

One event looms large in local memories: Hurricane Ivan, which scoured the coast in 2004. The original owners sold the Inn to the Dunavant family of Memphis after the storm’s destruction upended all plans in the area. The new owners had intended to tear down the inn to build condos on the spot, but their plans were upended, too. After the catastrophe of Katrina in 2005, the Inn turned into emergency housing for 36 families who had lost their homes in New Orleans. In 2009, the building was repaired and is now back in business as the only true bed-and-breakfast on this part of the coast.

If the Dunavants had redeveloped the old inn, they would have regretted it. It’s the gem of the Emerald Coast: an adults-only B&B whose rooms are both quaint and modern at the same time. Yes, they have coffee makers in each room, but you’ll find yourself wandering down to the Beach Walk Cafe for breakfast on the patio. The service from the staff is top-notch, and they’ll make you a box lunch to power your afternoon beach combing. In 2016, the inn was named the most romantic hotel in America by TripAdvisor.

“I think it’s the privacy and seclusion the inn offers,” says Schmidt. “Yes, there are other hotels on the beach in Destin, but there’s nothing quite like Henderson Park Inn. Being right next to the state park and with only 37 rooms, we offer a quieter, more relaxing stay while still being in the middle of all of Destin’s attractions. Plus there’s just something romantic about being able to share a bottle of wine with the person you love while gazing at a beautiful beach view.”

Come Fly with Me

Some days, the beach doesn’t cooperate. On one day of my recent stay, the wind came whipping off the Gulf, and spray misted the windows of my room. I did what many people do in my situation: I hopped in the car and drove an hour down the coast to Pensacola to visit the National Naval Aviation Museum.

“Having traveled the world with the Navy, I submit that the beaches in Northwest Florida are the finest beaches on the planet — and that includes Rio de Janerio — and the beaches in Pensacola are the finest on the Gulf Coast.” says Captain Sterling Gilliam (Ret.), director of the museum. “But when it rains, nobody wants to go to the beach. So we’re crushed here. We see a huge peak in visitation. We provide our patrons a lovely alternative for a bad weather day. Or let’s say it’s absolutely sunny for five days running. We see a big uptick in visitation as people seek refuge from the sun, and ‘lobster fest.’”

The museum is located on the sprawling campus of Naval Air Station Pensacola, where aspiring aviators come to train alongside the best flyers in the world. “Naval aviators were originally called naval air pilots,” says Hill Goodspeed, the museum’s chief historian. “The reason they changed it is, if you look at nautical terminology, the pilot guides the ship into port. So ‘aviator’ differentiates you from pilot. Plus, Navy people will say it just sounds more dashing.”

Captain Gilliam is one of those aviators. Before he was in charge of the 60-acre complex, where 150 aircraft on display tell the story of 109 years of aerial derring-do, he flew EA-6B Prowlers for three decades, chalking up 1,307 landings on 12 different aircraft carriers from the Philippines to the Arabian Sea. “Now, I’m in a non-flying status to tell the story of the vocation I was long a part of.”

The museum’s collection spans a century, beginning with the Curtiss NC-4, a hulking flying boat which became the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic ocean in 1919, eight years before Charles Lindbergh’s nonstop solo flight, at an average speed of 85 mph. Fifty years later, the Apollo spacecraft lifted aviator Neil Armstrong to the moon at a top speed of 25,000 mph. The Skylab 2 command module, which carried aviator Pete Conrad into orbit in 1973, is also on display at the museum.

The most impressive parts of the collection rest on a re-creation of the flight deck of the USS Cabot. These are planes from Naval aviation’s finest hour, the World War II Pacific Theater. There you’ll find a P-40 Warhawk painted in the colors of the Flying Tigers, and the F4U Corsair flown by George “Pappy” Boyington, the former Flying Tiger who gained fame as the leader of the Black Sheep squadron and was later played on TV by actor Robert Conrad.

Not far away sits an SBD Dauntless dive bomber that took off from Midway Island on June 4, 1942, to attack an approaching Japanese invasion fleet. When it returned to base, it had more than 200 bullet holes in it. After the battle, the damaged plane was pulled from front-line service, repaired, and assigned to a training squadron in Michigan. The next year, a student pilot got in trouble and ditched the plane in Lake Michigan, and it sat on the bottom for decades until it was recovered and restored by the museum. It is the only surviving plane that flew at the Battle of Midway.

For Goodspeed, the most interesting piece in the collection is not an airplane. It’s a set of wooden panels from an estate on Maui called Erehwon (“nowhere” spelled backwards). “The lady who owned it during World War II would host Naval aviators who were training at a nearby base,” he says. “They were doing their final training before they went to see combat. She would give them the run of the estate and allow them a few hours to unwind. She would have them autograph the wall of her den. These planks were sent to the museum by her family.”

The names scrawled on the wall include Medal of Honor winners and people who went on to positions of command and honor — and those who would die in action. “You see all those lives represented on those planks.”

These are the kinds of stories that inspire Captain Gilliam.

“I had a wonderful 30-year career in the Navy and I flew some pretty cool airplanes,” he says. “The talented men and women that flew with me, and the young 19-year-old kid who may have joined the Navy under police escort working a flight deck 14- or 15-hour days in the most inhospitable work environment on the planet. But that’s what really energized me over the course of those three decades with the phenomenal people that I work with.”

Destination Dining

Back in Destin, I’m eating sushi at Camille’s at Crystal Beach. Christopher Knight, the general manager of the restaurant, is originally from Pensacola. When he was a Boy Scout, he volunteered at the Naval Aviation Museum.

“They were restoring an A-6 Intruder,” he recalls. “They have these huge intakes on the sides. I was just small enough at 10 or 11 to fit in there. They gave me a hammer and a socket wrench and sent me in there …. They said, ‘Twist the bolt a few times, then you’re gonna see axle grease come pouring out. As soon as you see that flowing, yell and we’ll yank you out.’ I ended up covered from head to feet in that stuff. But it’s really, really cool. Some of the planes I helped restore are on display right now.”

Destin is one of the best places in the world to get fresh seafood, and it’s little places like Camille’s that make it special. The sushi on the second floor, a former Italian restaurant space, is outstanding. The sit-down space upstairs is only open for dinner. Downstairs is a casual beachside cafe that opens at 7 a.m.

“There’s a line out the door all day,” says Knight. “We’ve got hula hoops for girls in bikinis. Bring your dog — we’ve got dog bowls and dog biscuits. There’s a great place across the street to watch the sunset, then come up here and get dinner.”

A short distance away (really, everything in this small town is a short distance away) on Choctawatchee Bay is Dewey Destin’s Seafood. Started by the great-grandson of Leonard Destin, who founded the town in 1835, the rustic restaurant sits on a pier at the end of a short dirt road.

“It started very, very small,” says McKenzie Destin. “In the summertime, it’s filled to the gills with tourists and locals alike. But for the longest time, it was Destin’s best-kept secret, because it’s at the end of a road where you would never expect to find a restaurant.”

Dewey Destin’s now has three locations — two in Destin and one in Navarre Beach — serving the freshest possible fish. “We have shrimp peelers and fish cutters on-site seven days a week,” she says. “You’ll see something different on our blackboard menu every day.”

They’re famous for their fried shrimp, but everything is good here. “We don’t overpower the seafood with too much seasoning or too much fried batter,” Destin says.

In a town of snowbirds and imports, there aren’t too many true locals like the Destin family. “It’s truly like an old fishing village,” she says. “It’s a small town where everyone knows everyone and takes care of everyone. And of course, there are beautiful waterways on three sides, and you just can’t beat the beautiful emerald water, the white sands. There’s an amazing amount of family-owned businesses in town, and that is a really awesome thing to see.”

I ask Destin what she would say to people who were looking to visit the little slice of paradise that carries her family name. She pauses for a second, then laughs. “Don’t feed the seagulls.”