San Destin, Destin Florida (2012)

Last year I wrote this: 
What an unexpected summer I've had.  Last spring I thought it would be my  pretty typical summer with not much to do, especially once my son would go away to camp.  I was looking forward to that free time to clean out closets and other fun stuff like that.  But then things started to change.
    It started with my youngest son's best friend wanting to take him on vacation with him to Virgina for a couple of weeks. Hey- I was okay with that.  In fact I wanted to hide in his luggage too, but wouldn't you know they now have weight limits on how much you can bring aboard and sad to say I'm over that limit.  He went and had a glorious time.   I thought I would be blogging and getting caught up with things.  But instead I had to get ready for some volunteer work I had planned.  I never did get around to the blogging.  Part of the problem was my computer started to act up and do all sorts of frustrating things when I would try to insert images into the posts. In frustration I would walk away and just work on things that were more meaningful at the time.  
    My son came back and then my husband had to go to a business convention for his company.  He didn't mind going since he would also be completing some of his education requirements to keep his license.  He was able to line up a condo and decided to take us with him.  It was such a hardship having to go to Destin/ San Destin Florida.  
  
And that is as far as I got.
I wanted to include the pictures of Florida but due to the computer problem I never got to them until now.  I've gotten a new computer and some of the issues have cleared up and I can get things done again.  Trouble is now things are as slow as molasses when it comes to uploading the images I want to use.  But I did like some of the things I got and so will be using them now.

   This was taken a couple of days later when we decided we wanted to see Destin.

Going there this was what it looked like on the bay side.  To me there were too many boats and I was glad I wasn't having to go boating through all those boats.

 This was pretty typical as to what Destin looked like on the ocean side.

 And here's where all the boats go in to dock. and was pretty typical of Destin.

Destin Florida

Most of the time we spent in San Destin -
Here's my images of that place.
The place we stayed at. 

The view from our place.

 The view of the backside of the complex.

 Everyday we would check the flags that were flying to know what the ocean was doing.  And you needed to check hourly because it was constantly changing.
Here's some of the flags we saw.

When the kids couldn't go into the ocean they ended up spending their time by the pool, as far as away as they could get yet still be in my eyesight.

After the first day they got way too much sun and we ended up doing other things instead.
San Destin is definitely a tourist town and there were all sorts of fun things which they did while they were here.
 Like go-car racing

 And swinging together

 I got some video in between these shots but now I can't access it. You can just imagine the sounds they were making - all I know is that they sure did have fun.

Then they did some more go car racing on different tracks.

They weren't the only ones having fun doing other things.  I was being inspired myself.  When you see things like this you just can't help but to admire it and what to keep it with you for a long long time.

Or how about this:

Or this:

Just look at those colors in that water.
Because I was seeing stuff like that I knew how to paint it when I took a 'sip of wine and paint course' and here's my painting as I was working on it.

But the main reason I wanted to come to Florida was to see the beaches and the surrounding landscape.. 
So here's some of what I was hoping to see.

Back bay area's

 Pretty sunsets.

The beach area with everyone staking there spot.  The one thing I was so amazed to see was how white and finely grain the sand was.

And more of the beaches- This was looking to the east.

And this was looking to the west.

I decided I wanted to get  a photo from the top floor and this is what it looked like looking east.

 

 I found out that the area next to the the place where we were staying was a state park- Grayton Beach State Park.  I'm very appreciative Florida is trying to preserve some of this natural beauty and not let it all get developed.

Grayton Beach state park, Florida

And the one thing I really wanted to see was the beach dunes.
I was a little disappointed with them since man had messed with them so much and vegetation was growing on them.

 The front side of the dunes.

 

A dune at San Destin Beach Florida

 The backside of the dunes

 Here's some more pictures  that belongs to this trip, that were taken on the way there and back.
This was going into Mobile Alabama on I-10 headed to the tunnel that goes under the bay..

 This was the Mississippi River as seen from I-20.  I couldn't get over how low it was. 

It's hard to believe this was a year ago - my how time flies.  I've been meaning to do this post for quite awhile.  I guess what was motivating me was we had a chance to go back here again this year but something else came up and I'm going to do that instead.  I hope it won't take me a year to get this next outing done.     
Postscript: here's the geologic map of Florida
 
as you can see its pretty flat and most of the stuff is pretty recent in age.