The Road Less Taken

Three generations of one family discover the pleasures of County Road 30-A.

by John Branston
photography by Courtland William Richards

My mother was a map fundamentalist.

SweetTea Journal (Spring/Summer 2008) – Maps and trip itineraries were prepared by the American Automobile Association, whose authority was infallible and whose word was to be taken literally. To stray was to risk detours, bad food, unsanitary motel rooms, and unspeakable bathrooms. If a place was too small, or a road too insignificant to be on the AAA map, then it simply did not exist.

Dad was a map follower with an asterisk, insisting on the user’s right to improvise and take unmarked roads just to see what was down them. On a solo ramble from Florida back to Michigan in 1975, he veered off U.S. Highway 98 west of Panama City and took County Road 30-A and discovered Seagrove Beach.

Being partial to motels with “villas” in their name and proprietors who stood behind the check-in desk and handed you your room key, he stayed at the first motel he came to, Seagrove Villas, in a little one-room unit perched on top of a sand dune overlooking the Gulf. He sent me a postcard saying the water was the clearest and the sand the whitest he had ever seen—no small compliment from a man who had grown up and spent most of his life near Lake Michigan. He gave me directions and suggested I check it out sometime.

So the word was spread, and a few years later my wife and I began our own thirty-year relationship with Seagrove Beach and the evolving landscape along 30-A. We’ve gone from newlyweds to young parents to over-fifty empty nesters, and we’re still going back—most recently in 2007 with our college-age daughter and three of her friends.

“Undiscovered” is a relative term, of course, when applied to any place on the Florida coast. Each year we marveled at all the construction around our little vacation spot and the new homes and condos being built and the prices we saw in the windows of the real estate companies that sprang up to market vacation properties.

But the growth along 30-A was different. For the most part, it wasn’t the pell-mell, anything-for-a-buck development. There was planning, preservation, design, and pedestrian scale to it. Environmental activists fiercely protected the dune lakes that overflow into the Gulf of Mexico and are unique to this part of Florida. There are twice as many state parks and forests (four) as high-rises along 30-A (two, both grandfathered in before restrictions were imposed limiting elevations to fifty feet). Instead of widening 30-A to accommodate more cars, a nineteen-mile bike path now parallels the road, and people ride bicycles to get places as well as for fun. Cars actually stop for them. Nearly thirty years after my first visit to the beaches of south Walton County, bike rental agencies actually outnumber gas stations along 30-A.

It seems that every little community along the south Walton coast has an art gallery or two, but there is not a fast-food drive-through to be found. Of the twenty-six miles of beach between Destin and Panama City, six miles are in public parks, including the three miles of unspoiled beach in 1,640-acre Topsail Hill Preserve State Park that are accessible only by bike, by tram, or on foot. It is still possible to walk a quarter of a mile or so and go one-on-one with Mother Nature at Topsail Hill, which is within sight of the high-rises of Sandestin.

For Memphians like my wife and me and for other Southerners, one of the main attractions of our favorite spots along 30-A is purely logistical. The Panhandle is a day’s drive at most, reachable for a long weekend or a one-week spring vacation from school. The weather is a gamble when Easter comes early, but by the end of March the odds tend to be in your favor. There hasn’t been a year when we didn’t get in the water.

Our spring trip to Seagrove Beach with our two children became an annual event with its own little rituals: the stops for Cajun boiled peanuts at a roadside stand in Mississippi or Alabama, the tunnel and the USS Alabama battleship in Mobile, the bridge over Pensacola Bay, the first one brave enough to get in the water, the first sand castle, the first porpoise sighting, the first one to find a sand dollar, the first pompano caught on a surf cast and grilled for dinner, the first fried-grouper sandwich from a take-out café. We had picnics at Eden Gardens State Park on the Choctawhatchee Bay on the other side of nearby U.S. 98 so we could take a picture of the azalea bushes in front of the old Wesley house and sit on the dock and watch the mullet jump in the glare of the sun. For fried-grouper sandwiches there was Seagrove Village Market Café or funky Grayton Beach, where tin-roofed houses tucked behind a tangle of trees sport strings of white Christmas tree lights in the middle of spring.

We usually saw a few of the same faces every year, and friendships were quickly made on the beach by both children and parents. We would invariably return home to Memphis with business cards and promises to get together next year. We never did, but there were new names and more promises the next year. There was a sense of community among the vacationers as well as the residents who were in on the secret in the early days. Even if the springs in the sofa beds in some of the rental units were impossible to sleep on, the price was right, the view was perfect, and the place so laid-back that we rarely went anywhere else more than a mile away from Seagrove Beach.

We learned that the owners of Seagrove Villas, Elizabeth Flowers and her husband, Dick, were personally responsible for thousands of loyal visitors like us to the Florida Panhandle every year. Mr. Flowers is deceased now, but the family still owns part of the original Seagrove Villas.

Much like my father did three decades ago, the Flowers family happened upon Seagrove and the villas by chance. As Mrs. Flowers describes it, “In 1970, my husband had been coaching football at Florida State in Tallahassee, and he retired. We started scouting around for a place to retire. We had two boys who loved the water. It was just by accident we found the motel.” There were four duplex cottages and a pool on the beach side of the road and five more cottages across the road and a building for an office and a restaurant that has since closed.

“We never dreamed it would get as busy as it has,” Mrs. Flowers told me. “We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The same people came back wanting the same place every year. When they got back home, nobody would tell where they’d been because they didn’t want to not be able to get a reservation again. Word of mouth isn’t what brought them in. They found it just like we did, riding around.”

By the late 1980s, it was clear that the secret was out and County Road 30-A was undergoing something of a land rush. But a sense of community and shared history were passed from old-timers to newcomers. When the South Walton Three Arts Alliance decided in 1996 to publish a book on local history, twenty-one writers, artists, and editors contributed to The Way We Were. A second volume, Of Days Gone By, was published in 1999, with forty-one contributors this time. They wrote about hurricanes, Al Capone’s visits to Grayton Beach in the 1920s, the German submarines that sank freighters off the Gulf Coast during World War II, horseback riding on the beach, free-ranging hogs that outlived the towns that raised them, the dance floor at Butler’s Grayton Beach Store, the coming of telephone service in 1958, and the vision of Seaside founder and developer Robert Davis. It was Davis and his team of architects that created a different kind of planned community on the beach and set the tone for the so-called New Urbanism movement that swept the country.

Celebrity meant increases in property values and the cost of annual vacations. Along with Seaside came other planned communities, including Rosemary Beach, WaterColor, and WaterSound. There was more to do away from the beach as our family got older—bike trails, Internet cafés, seafood markets that would steam and season your shrimp before you took them home, a new grocery store, all kinds of restaurants, tennis centers with lit courts, and kayak trips on the dune lakes.

In the early years of our visits, when my wife and I were avid players, tennis meant a half-hour trip to Sandestin or a community college in Panama City. Now we can walk or bike along 30-A to three tennis clubs with several lit clay courts, teaching pros, clinics, and—best of all—fresh playing partners to trade names, notes, and lies with.

My daughter and I bike almost everywhere. When the traffic backs up at noon on a sunny day, it’s actually faster than taking a car. I’ve gotten in the habit of bringing my own bicycle, but Big Daddy’s Bikes in Blue Mountain Beach has a good selection of cruisers, hybrids, and speed bikes for sale or rent. The paved bike trail is 19.4 miles from end to end and mostly flat.

“On a typical beach cruiser, that’s a two-hour ride,” says Judah Imhof, age twenty-nine, who works at Big Daddy’s. “The typical tourist is not looking for speed and can comfortably do that on a cruiser, and probably can cut it to an hour and a half on a hybrid.”
Well, maybe—but remember, you’ve got to get back, too. And the people-watching is pretty intense when you get to Seaside and Rosemary Beach. Something about a Florida bike trail brings out the weekend warriors, families, slowpokes, and hard bodies in equal numbers. Plus, you’re on vacation, so what’s the hurry?

It sounds strange, but over the years what changed the most from one vacation to the next was the beach itself. There was development, to be sure, but there also were storms. Several hurricanes have touched the beaches of south Walton County in the past thirty years, although none has done the destruction that befell, say, Pensacola Beach; Orange Beach, Alabama; or New Orleans in recent years. Still, the toll on the dunes and boardwalks can be startling to that mental picture you have of your favorite spot.

“Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and Dennis in 2005 caused some pretty dramatic changes,” says Brad Pickel, a marine scientist and beach management consultant for the county. “Fortunately, we have not had a direct hit of a hurricane. Our beach width comes back within a few years, but the elevation takes a little longer. What happens is the sand dries and the wind will blow it up into the dunes. Waves build our beaches, and wind builds our dunes. People often don’t notice the change when they’re standing on the beach looking out at the water until they turn around.”

The other obvious sign of storm damage is battered boardwalks. This can be due to the force of waves, such as the surge that washed out the bridges over Pensacola Bay and the Mississippi Sound in 2005, or to erosion around the pilings. Since Hurricane Dennis in 2005, the Walton County Tourist Development Council has rebuilt more than fifty dune walkovers, many with much stouter pilings. Restoring a beach is a long and expensive process. Currently, plans are underway for a major restoration of the 30-A area that involves dredging sand from offshore.

The beaches of south Walton County have been called the best in the country, and the Clean Beaches Council has awarded its “Blue Wave” environmental certification to the Walton County coastline for water and beach quality and consumer education. Taking care of twenty-six miles of beach means emptying four hundred trash cans every day, planting sea oats on the dunes, monitoring the nesting of loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles, and rebuilding beaches after storms by taking sand from one place and moving it to another.

Pickel explains that the water stays clear because unlike, say, Apalachicola to the east or Mobile to the west, there are no inlets or passes for river systems that deposit a lot of sediment. The tea-colored, tannin-stained outfall from the dune lakes when they overflow with rainwater quickly dissipates.

Many Walton County natives, such as Brenda Rees, a writer and Florida historian who has had a family home here for fifty years, consider Walton County’s fifteen coastal dune lakes—not the beach—to be its signature feature. They are globally rare, found only in Walton County and in Australia, New Zealand, and Africa. From her back porch on Eastern Lake, where she now lives, Rees can swim or catch flounder, redfish, mullet, and trout. She remembers that when she was a girl, fish lined up to get out of the outfall like a run of salmon. “We were able to reach down with our hands and throw them up on the shore like an Alaskan bear,” she says. 

Development did take a toll on the dunes next to Eastern Lake. Ironically, some apartments and condominiums with “dune” in their names have actually destroyed them. “The big developers of the planned communities are doing a better job than some of the smaller or second-rate developers of the past,” Rees says.

Nowadays developers understand that environmentally sensitive building practices keep home buyers and vacationers coming. Landscaping features at WaterColor, for instance, include a community herb garden that fills with butterflies when fall flowers bloom. WaterColor’s master plan requires that within three hundred feet of a dune lake, seventy-five percent of the native vegetation must be preserved. Native vegetation has adapted to the arid climate and requires no watering, only trimming. WaterColor’s progressive building codes require one-hundred-foot setbacks from the lake. Created ponds and wetlands filter out contaminants and have become important wildlife habitats. And a network of picturesque community piers, boardwalks, bridges, and walking trails in the buffer zone have essentially given ownership of the lake to everyone.

No doubt about it, 30-A has made the big time and is now even on your typical AAA trip itinerary. Thirty years after my dad discovered it, I’m the “old man” now, dragging my aching knees up and down the steps to the beach. I figure by milking it a little bit I can probably get my daughter and her friends to carry my stuff. Nice to know they can still stand us for a week. Nice, too, that when they said good-bye in March to drive back to school, they promised that they would all be back.