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Written By Sean Fitzmorris
We've just gotten back from Florida & Ingrid’s wedding in Panama City Beach. What a dump. A four hour drive to picturesque Destin and then another hour to Panama City Beach with its gray sand, not-quite-aqua colored water and Day-Glo fluorescent Miracle Strip. PCB apparently had its heyday around the 1950’s and shortly thereafter; a fact it has apparently never gotten over. It isn’t called the “Redneck Riviera” for nothing. Think of a built-up trailer park and add sand. Upon driving into the first few hundred yards of tropical-sounding Front Beach Boulevard, one is greeted with what one would expect - palm trees, a few high-rise condominiums, a moderne Winn Dixie and lots of geriatrics. Turn a corner and poof! – the Strip: several miles of houses constructed in basic geometric shapes – cubes, trapezoids, pyramids, cylinders and some shapes requiring algebraic equations and graphs to describe. Most have faux stucco facades painted in garish hues of off-white, off-blue, off-pink… you get the idea. All had been constructed a couple of generations ago and have avoided the gaze of would-be renovators and developers ever since. A monument to preservation, yes, but not a great monument. After a long drive at ten miles per hour below the speed limit, thanks to the particular octogenarian and his not much younger vehicle which we were following, we came upon that part of Front Beach Boulevard for which throngs of K- and Wal-Mart shoppers in unheard-of backwoods southeastern U.S. communities yearn in their hearts and tacky souls: Miracle Strip! Aptly named, indeed, considering that hyperdeveloped Florida has obviously forgotten to bring the Strip’s motels, amusement parks and souvenir shops cum tattoo parlors into the sensitive, politically correct, earth-toned nineties. Or even into the eighties for that matter. We began to search for a hotel. It wasn’t an easy task, like trying to find the least tacky needle in a pastel haystack. Many of the hotels along Miracle Strip were built along the lines of the Bates’ Motel in Psycho; long rectangular rows of doors, presumably with rooms behind them. I couldn’t help being reminded of the cubbyholes we had in elementary school, only these were slightly smaller and somewhat uglier. Some hoteliers must have wanted to escape the predominant mold and, in a frenzy of creativity, slapped on a coat of vivid blue or purple or fuschia or whatever color was on clearance at the local Ace Hardware. This decorative élan transformed the motels from looking like rows of self-storage buildings to looking like rows of self-storage buildings painted cheap colors. In a sudden fit of adventurousness, our foursome had earlier forgone making reservations anywhere, instead planning on finding some quaint little place when we got there. In our minds this lovely seaside village was teeming with charming bed-and-breakfasts staffed by little old ladies or hip dot-com millionaires who wanted a sideline business. Yeah, right. So, avoiding the beachside equivalent to office cubicles, we checked several motels with franchise names we recognized – Ramada Inn, Days Inn, Best Western. All were similarly priced. Our final decision would finally be made on the basis of an available vacancy, as there apparently was a convention of Orthodox Rednecks in town and most of the neon inns were full up. We settled at last on the Best Western Del Coronado. Our choice wasn’t because this was the only vacancy or the nicest of accommodations (it wasn’t), but rather because we all really had to pee. And since the BWDC had no public toilet in the lobby, we were willing to pay $109 for the use of the toilet in room 129. We even got to use it as many times as we wanted, until check-out time that is. As lagniappe, they threw in the use of the two double beds, TV, fridge, microwave and shower. The room was luxuriously appointed with fake rattan headboards firmly screwed to the faux stucco wall (faux stucco is everywhere), a fake rattan floor lamp tilted to a fashionable 15 degrees from perpendicular, a formica table and more fake rattan in the form of chairs. I felt a little guilty about those devastated groves of fake rattan, raped and pillaged by interior decorators with degrees from mail-order correspondence schools. But I got over it. The shower (no bathtub) was made of real tile in the exact shade of yellow that bile is when puked from an empty stomach. Green and whitish cousins of the shower tile populated the remainder of the bathroom and had colonized the rest of the floor into the bedroom. Carpeting was completely absent. Though there must have been heroic efforts to keep the floor clean, there was still the invisible but quite palpable grit of sand that the maid couldn’t get out. So we changed after carrying out all the necessary rituals of excretion. Expectedly, though inexplicably, the women took great pains to apply their makeup before venturing out onto the beach. Perhaps the makeup-on-the-beach phenomenon is a sort of extra barrier against wind, sand, salt and sun, all of which would have to wear through the layers before being able to ravage the tender flesh below. Whatever the reason, we were all eager to get out into the elements after five hours stuck in a car, so we were all out the door in record time. The beach that awaited us was the same off-white color that so many locals found on clearance in the paint department. Maybe they all just went and scooped up a bunch of sand off the beach and lacquered it onto their houses. The sand seemed to have been white once, but now appeared to have the color that the sand in hotel lobby ashtrays have, though the hotel sand has been sifted and picked free of detritus and molded with the logo of the hotel pressed into it, cookie cutter style. The beach sand had not been. The water was nice, but not wonderful. It was wet, salty and warm, but not the crystal-clear turquoise that every town near a beach and calls itself a resort claims to have. Upon entering the water, one encounters the remains of thousands of shattered mollusks. Broken seashells by the ton rolled in the ebb and flow at the seashore. I marveled that there could be so many square yards of shell pieces entirely devoid of any completely intact shells. Fortunately these had mostly been polished to rounded edges by the ashtray sand so our feet were spared the hideous lacerations so famous for spoiling seaside holidays. As the sun set, we returned to the room, and the sand on our feet made the invisible layer of grit on the floor a little bit more visible. After taking turns in the pukey-yellow shower we were ready to go out. Fortunately Ingrid and her friends were going to an Applebee’s. I’m not normally a fan of institutional food doled out amidst a variety of knickknacks on the walls, presumably meant to be nostalgic (though what they are supposed to be nostalgic of I am at a loss to describe), but at least there I would know what to expect; unlike whatever fate would have awaited our palates had we explored some unfranchised, Panama City Beach based, Eats-R-Us patisserie. Stir-fried local hermit crab and a corn-dog appetizer, perhaps. But we went and dinner was pleasant enough, with several doses of beer to wash it all down and keep the conversation lively, though Andrew, Marion and I were the only ones imbibing of our little group of seven. Later we made our way back to the motel. We drove down the neon lighted Miracle Strip amid hundreds of cars filled with shirtless males and bikini-topped, big-haired females, none of whom looked older than eighteen. It took about half an hour to make it down the two or three miles to our hotel. When we finally got there Andrew and I went across the street to the package store and bought four enormous “oilcans” of Foster’s. Foster’s is the kind of lager that is promoted as the sort of thing that all Australians wish would come running out of the taps in their homes. It’s supposed to be the type of beer that if it suddenly ceased to exist, workers of every pub and liquor store Down Under might as well shut down and join a Buddhist monastery. In reality, Foster’s is to Australia what Schaeffer’s Lite or Pabst Blue Ribbon is here. It’s generally viewed as a less palatable version of kangaroo pee, reserved for the truly desperate drunk. All this notwithstanding, Andrew and I made our purchase along with margarita-flavored Seagram’s coolers for the girls and headed back to the shrine of fake rattan. No stay near a beach is complete without a nighttime excursion to it. There, one can enjoy the solitude and quiet that darkness brings. We headed out. The ashtray sand glowed a pearly white. There was solitude, quiet and darkness. The solitude, however, was broken by the several dozen groups of people in our vicinity who had also come to the beach to swim, chat, drink, holler at women passing by or be hollered at while passing by. The quiet was pierced by horn blasts and traffic on the nearby strip, as well as the aforementioned hollering. And the darkness was bravely driven back by the quadrillion-candlepower halogen and sodium-vapor lamps that were directed onto the sand from the beach motels; piercing the night with all the actinic fury they could muster. I tried to drink my oilcan before the balmy air warmed it to the ambient temperature – approximately that of fresh kangaroo pee. I wasn’t successful. It is truly amazing how different the same beverage can taste at two different temperatures. Foster’s, for instance, can be a sudsy, refreshing, light-tasting brew when drunk right from the fridge, and at Panama City Beach temperature it can also taste like, well, kangaroo pee. Nonetheless, Andrew and I had consumed enough of our oilcans to be sufficiently lubricated to venture into the sea for a nighttime swim. The hydrogen bomb-bright lights, though vivid enough to cause acute retinal damage, did little to warm the Gulf of Mexico. Though I cannot fathom that this immense expanse of water had varied greatly in temperature since that afternoon, but within minutes my teeth were chattering and my limbs shivered with cold. I wondered what laws of thermodynamics could simultaneously cause me to feel like I had suddenly stepped into a briny meat locker while warming my beer as efficiently as the deepest recesses of a marsupial’s kidneys. At any rate, I had to get out. We headed back to the room, adding more sand to the now quite visible and very palpable layer collecting on the green and off-white tile floor. Next Day We slept well that night (I did anyway). The next morning Andrew and I went to Burger king for the girls to get what was to pass as breakfast. Let me just say that a better circus production could not have been put on by Barnum and Bailey themselves than the comedy act we encountered there at the BK. We were waiting in line behind two guys who, after standing there for an eternity got to place their order. They wanted lunch. The girl at the cash register drawled that lunch was not going to be served for a while yet. Breakfast-ish stuff was served until 10:00 and it was only 9:45. Dejectedly, the two guys left, after whom we were allowed to place our order. Exactly 120 seconds after the two guys left, the manager announced, rather loudly, that there was no more breakfast-ish stuff and only lunch orders would be taken from then on. Our order had fortunately (?) been put in during that 120-second grace period the two unfortunates had left to us. During the next twenty minutes everyone in the queue was entertained by the antics of the circus clowns behind the counter, with their shouting, tripping over feet and boisterous confusion. Much of those twenty minutes was spent looking for our order, which the clowns had obviously lost. The ironic thing is that the bag containing our order was sitting in plain view to everyone, at least on our side of the counter. With a little helpful guidance by Andrew, our oefs en crôute (oh, okay, croissandwiches) were finally located. We absconded back to our hotel with what I laughingly refer to as “fast food”, since what resided in the brown paper bag had certainly not been delivered “fast” and would pass muster as “food” only by the most liberal definition of the word; that is, it has presumably been cooked and was not immediately harmful when consumed. After we ate, while we dressed to go to Ingrid’s wedding, the phone rang. Grainne answered and later let us know that the front desk was performing a “courtesy call” by letting us know that checkout time was in thirty minutes. In other words, ‘hurry up and get your arses out of there!’ We loaded up the car in the PCB sun and heat wearing coats, ties and dresses. I couldn’t help feeling a little out of place as everyone in their swimsuits and flipflops marched past us on their way to the beach. Panama City Beach doesn’t compare to Destin. The two towns are barely an hours drive apart, yet you would swear that they were in two different states. Just down the road from PCB’s neon, gray sand, tattoo parlors and tourist traps from pastel hell are the (literally) sugar-white beaches of laid back, designer Destin, Florida, cosmopolitan in its own small town way. You can tell that early in its evolution Destin experimented with a “Strip” á la PCB, but abandoned that idea and went for a style more appealing to city-dwellers expecting luxury condos, good restaurants, quality entertainment and clean beaches; leaving their country bumpkin cousins to enjoy the trailer-park-by-the-sea atmosphere of Panama City Beach. Thus after Ingrid’s wedding reception, we made a beeline out of there, saying good-bye to the Miracle Strip and anticipating an afternoon in nearby picturesque Destin. We weren’t disappointed. It was a lovely day; sunny and hot, but tempered by the steady breezes that blow in off the Gulf of Mexico. We went to the usual spot that Grainne and I go to when we’re in Destin – the section of beach accessible from the parking lot of Sandpiper Cove condominiums on Gulf Shore Drive. We changed into our swimsuits in the car on the way and settled ourselves on the beach. The beach population here is very different from the PCB people. In Destin, people have a more relaxed attitude toward being there. If they want to get into the water, they can. If not, fine, maybe later. If they want to fall asleep on the beach, they do so without worrying that they might miss a female to holler at. In Panama City, the crowds seemed to relax at a more frenetic pace, as if they had to do all that they could possibly do, otherwise it just wasn’t a vacation. They reminded me of a starving child with a full plate, anxious to eat everything on it as quickly as possible lest someone take it away, heedless that his haste would likely make him sick afterward. The Destin beachgoers had no such anxiety. Their philosophy of relaxing meant doing what you wanted when you wanted to do it. If you didn’t get around to renting jet skis or finishing your book or bungee jumping, there’s always next time. What attracts me to places like Destin isn’t the luxury condo’s (I can’t afford them) or the late-night clubs (I don’t go to them), but rather this attitude that makes relaxing there come so easily. We spent the rest of the day there in Destin, recuperating from the trauma of Panama City. We had some beers, ate some sandwiches, swam in the sea and had a far better time in the few hours we whiled away that afternoon than the whole two days before. The sugar white (not ashtray gray) sand was hot and clean under our feet. There were no mounds of shards of dead mollusks to irritate our feet. Our ears were not once assaulted by redneck shrieking and nowhere on the road could we see a single pink-painted tattoo parlor. Still, our excursion to Panama City wasn’t completely without pleasantness. There is always the shining hope that a massive hurricane will scour it away, scrubbing the Redneck Riviera clean for a better future.
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