Panama City Beach in the Florida panhandle is one of those places that remind you of a combination of other places, a blend of kitschy charm found in Myrtle Beach, Atlantic City and Key West. It’s a place unto its own, though, and one where you’ll soon find, by dialect and design, a place apart from what you might usually think of as the Sunshine State.
South Florida, more a mindset than geographical location, is arguably from the middle of the state down, where everyone seems to be from somewhere else, and where you’re more likely to hear a New York or ethnic accent than a true southern one. But in Panama City Beach, in the belly of the Deep South, right below Alabama and Georgia and hard by Mississippi and Louisiana, is where you’ll hear locals, when they’re saying they’re going someplace, that “I’m fixin’ to go to…,” a place where the accent is as common as grits on down-home restaurant menus and upscale eateries alike.
It’s a small place, with around 7,500 year-round residents, but with big-time tourist numbers, about six million a year. Given its northern Florida location buffeted by Gulf of Mexico breezes, it doesn’t get nearly as oppressively steamy as other places in the state, even in summer.
We visited over New Year’s weekend at the end of 2012, never having been before, and found a eclectic place of tattoo parlors, tchotchke stores, dive shops, go-cart tracks, and, I kid you not, the “Condom Knowledge Novelty Shop,” side by side in an area with upscale restaurants, shops, family attractions and high-rise condos..
Typical building style in Panama City
In January 2012, the city finished a three-month, $16-million beach re-nourishment project working with the U.S. Corps of Engineers, pumping 1.4-million cubic yards of sand to about seven and a half miles of beach, extending the shoreline by 100 feet in some locations. It was the third major beach replenishment in the last dozen years.
One of the city’s crown recreational jewels is St. Andrews State Park with a stunning beach that was named the second-best in America by TripAdvisor. The 1,260-acre park has forest, snow-white sand dunes covered with sea oats, fresh and saltwater marshes, a lagoon swimming area, fishing jetties, hiking trails, a mile and a half of beach and two campgrounds. It is also home to many white-tailed deer, hundreds of bird species, and the occasional alligator. It opened in 1951, and had been the site of a World War II military reservation. There is also the newly opened 2,900-acre Panama City Beach Conservation Park, created to rehydrate thousands of acres of protected wetlands, which consists of a system of boardwalks and 24 miles of dirt trails.
Panama City Beach has a lot of the old-Florida feel, but it’s a city on the rise, a low-key, down-home kind of place with a central touristy core in Pier Park, a retail strip opened in 2008 by the water with more than a million square feet of shopping and eating, with entities like Margaritaville (try the El Diablo, a true burger in paradise, topped with poblano peppers), French Charmed, Francesca’s Collection and an IMAX theater. For families, there’s a great playground there, with some of the original rides from the iconic Miracle Strip Amusement Park that closed a few years ago. Other family favorites in the city include Shipwreck Island Water Park, Gulf World Marine Park, Emerald Coast Mirror Maze and Grand Maze at Coconut Creek.
It’s also gotten easier to get there; in 2010, Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport opened, the first international airport in the country to open since the terrorist attacks of 2001, served by just two airlines so far, Southwest and Delta. It’s a place so new it’s not surrounded by the usual glut of airport hotels, restaurants and stores, a virtual stand-alone entity in the middle of a forest, a place with a welcoming, unhurried feel, not to mention unusually cheap airport parking: The long-term lot charge as of January 2013 was $9 a day.
Liza’s kitchen
The interior of the Firefly Restaurant
More upscale and trendy are places like Firefly, where the signature dishes are the silky smooth she-crab soup and the espresso-rubbed and tomato-braised free-range Texas boar shank, succulent, sweet and so tender, it falls off the bone. They also create a mean John Daly, named after the pro golfer, a concoction of vodka, lemonade and ice tea that is disarmingly easy to consume. Chef Paul Stellato creates the menu, and is used to pressure, having cooked for Team USA athletes at last year’s summer Olympics. But he faced pressure of another kind in 2010, when President Obama and his family dined there and the president had the N.Y strip steak and his wife the fried lobster – with the Secret Service watching every move of preparation. For the record, he paid with his personal credit card, with agents taking all records of the transaction with them.
Interior, Andy’s Flour Power
Andy’s Flour Power Cafe skillet dish
Panama City Beach was largely spared damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the gulf oil spill in 2010, remaining a steady, reliable and temperate choice for tourists, drawing mainly from the southern states. If you’re from father away and fixin’ to check out the real Florida as it used to be and still is in the panhandle, Panama City Beach is a pretty good choice..
For information on the destination, visit www.visitpanamacitybeach.com