seaside

As mentioned in an earlier post Claude and I took a little trip to Seaside a couple of weeks ago as a late summer vacation/anniversary trip. We had a wonderful time and don't think we would mind one bit going back for each and every anniversary:) We'll see about that huh?

It was a fairly long drive down-we started on Monday morning and got to the beach mid-late afternoon. After checking in to our little house Claude had to make a trip right into the ocean...

Because we were planning on going out to eat pretty soon thereafter (and it takes me a good bit longer to get ready to go somewhere) I stayed on dry land as my shadow shows below:

We then headed off to find The Lake Place Restaurant in Santa Rosa Beach. [One really nice thing about going to the beach during the off-season is that it's not all that busy. This was especially nice when we would go out to eat and not have to wait and wait and wait as is sometimes the case... ] Our food was delicious and very artfully presented, but a little meager in portion size...so we just decided to get dessert back in the main Seaside shops. From our honeymoon last year we both quickly remembered treats at the yogurt shop so that decision was easy to make. Claude had the Yobe yogurt (which we haven't found anywhere else but at this shop-any help anyone?) and I had key-lime pie, and these choices actually turned out to be our dessert staples for several nights.

On Tuesday morning we decided to take some books and read while we ate breakfast (french toast and pancakes, yum!) at The Great Southern Cafe which was just a short walk from our house. It was also so nice to get to eat on the outside porch on a pretty day. See Claude below:

After we finished eating we walked around a couple of the shops that were open and headed back to the upstairs porch to read some more...
This is the view from our upstairs porch-we were right across the street from the Seaside Chapel and actually saw 2 bride and groom couples while in the midst of their picture taking during our stay!
During the afternoon we spent a little time on the beach and for supper went to our favorite place from last year...Cafe Thirty-A. It was once again DELICIOUS!!! Definitely not the kind of place we eat at regularly so we thoroughly enjoyed it-and our server there was especially nice. Unfortunately we had to tell him we were too stuffed for dessert but would you believe that once we got back to Seaside again we changed our minds. Claude stayed with his yogurt but I broke down and just had to try a cupcake from a place that just opened this summer. It's Queen Bee Cupcakes-it's a really cute little shop in an airstream trailer with delicious cupcakes-even if they are a bit on the high side:) I can personally recommend the key-lime, vanilla pink, and chocolate pink, haha. After picking up our desserts we would stop by and get a movie from the kiosk-Claude typically got to pick the movie because for some reason I can never seem to stay awake throughout an entire movie! Therefore, I can't really comment on any of the movies we watched because I missed the latter1/4 to 1/2 of them in general:(

On Wednesday our typical routine continued. Reading over breakfast (for me) and coffee (for Claude);

walking around the shops; lunch; beach; tennis; and then dinner/dessert/movie. We ate lunch at the Taco Bar and then walked right down to the beach from there.

We're not the biggest beach bums you'll find so we usually were about beached out after an hour or so. Even with our "limited" beach time per day we did remember to get a beach picture or two while we were out there:

After playing tennis for a set or two, that night we drove down to Grayton Beach and ate at a little restaurant called Gravel Road. It was very quaint and our food was very good there as well. Then back to Seaside.

As Thursday morning rolled around I was starting to get a little sad because our vacation was coming to a close too quickly. We drove to Destin late morning to early afternoon and mainly looked around a little at the outlets. Once we got back we hit the beach and courts for a little bit and then got ready to go eat at Bud and Alley's which we could just walk right over to. We ate there last year and felt we should give it a chance again this year too since it is the main Seaside restaurant. For some reason-maybe we ordered poorly- we weren't all that impressed yet again this year with this restaurant. It was probably our least favorite meal of the trip, but our table had a nice view:) Rather than getting someone to take pictures for us, we attempted self-portraits before we walked over to Bud and Alley's...as I'm posting these pictures below I think next time we should ask someone to snap a couple for us, haha.

try1:try 2:
try 3:
On our ritual stop to the yogurt shop (which actually doubles as a fudge shop as well) we thought this was pretty funny-there were all these blocks in lots of different flavors of fudge and right out front was a block labeled "new flavor"... We were kind of curious why they didn't actually give more detail on the actual flavor and wondered how many takers there would be for "new flavor"!
As the last morning of our full day at the beach dawned we set out to get the most of the day. This of course included making sure to get a shot of where we stayed-Park Place:
And here's a full shot of the chapel which was diagonally across the street from us. To any of our friends who might consider destination weddings in the future we think this would be a beautiful place to get married and would be more than happy to make the trip down for your big day:)

One of my favorite shops in Seaside is Modicas Market-a fairly small grocery with a pretty impressive range of products. If you've ever seen the Truman Show then you've actually seen the inside of Modicas Market! It's also where we went to read over coffee and breakfast several mornings and where we grabbed lunch on Friday. They had a grouper sandwich lunch that was a great way to start wrapping up our trip:
We were very fortunate to have really nice weather all week (it only sprinkled two or three times the whole week that we remember)...especially considering the reports we heard of downpours of rain both back in MS and GA. After enjoying the beach and playing one last round of tennis that afternoon we got ready to go out for our last supper-all week for our meals out we'd been using these fantastic deals from Restaurant.com that I'd spotted and snagged a couple of weeks earlier and we had several left to a couple of different places. After looking them up we decided to try a place called Goatfeathers because it looked like it would be a good place to get a pretty decent "beach" meal. It was a low-key casual restaurant but we got tons of food that was quite tasty. Claude convinced me to get the lobster/steak dinner and so we both got to try a couple of bites of lobster-he in return let me have a taste of his dinner which was some kind of fish I think. Once we got back we decided to go ahead and start packing up a bit so that the next morning wouldn't be so crazy trying to get ready to leave. Saturday morning we went ahead and went for one last quick walk down to the beach.


After rinsing the sand off our feet one last time it was time to pack up the car and check out. This is how Claude felt about it. [This probably has something to do with it being the end of his much-deserved week off as well:)]

Well, it's been said that all good things must come to an end. We hope you've enjoyed our little recap of our beach trip! We definitely had a great time, but were actually happy to get back to our house after a week away:) As we finish up here, we'll leave you with one last shot of the coastline:
Happy Tuesday!