wine on the keyboard

Destin

Fort Walton Beach-Okaloosa Island

by Kay~Kacey on 10/8/2010

Okay, back to another vacation review post. After we left St. Augustine Beach, we headed across Florida. We were torn between the Destin area and the Gulf Shores area, but decided to try Destin since we hadn’t been there in about 6 years or so.

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I will say that Destin has the most beautiful water. Hands down. We usually stay on on Okaloosa Island at the Summerlin condos and either rent through VRBO or one of the rental companies. The Summerlin condos are a relatively smaller complex, 6 floors and about 6? units per floor.

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This was off season, so not very crowded by their standards…but very crowded coming from the deserted beaches of South Ponte Vedra Beach out of St. Augustine. This was the view from our balcony on the 5th floor.

destin-8650This was the view from the walkway on the back of the building of the Santa Rosa Sound. Very pretty.

The thing we don’t like about the Destin area, and we’ll probably not go back? We are beach walkers. Destin beaches are SO steep. The water only varies slightly with the tides too. Not much wet sand beach to walk on, and if you do, one foot is way uphill and one downhill as you walk along the beach. Most people seem to walk up in the flat sandy part of the beach, but we really enjoy the water’s edge.

destin-8681Like I said though, the water is crystal clear. We could see see turtles swimming and lots of fish. Pretty water.

If you go to that area, be sure to eat at Staff Restaurant on Miracle Strip Parkway. Wonderful! I’m not much of a meat eater, but I get their steak. Yummy. Oh, and they have very cold beer. Just sayin’

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Destin also serves up brilliant sunsets down the beach, don’t they? :love:

As we get older, we seem to get more and more picky about the beaches we go to and the amount of people on them. I’m pretty sure we’re headed back to St. Augustine next year, unless we can find an area of the Outer Banks where you can see the actual shoreline from your house and not have such huge sand dunes to climb over, because we loved the Outer Banks too. Just missed being able to see the waves break on shore from our deck.