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Published: June 17th 2017
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Road trip time! it was time to leave New Orleans and Louisiana and head east to Florida. We were doing a mini road trip as our final destination would be Savannah, Georgia, but instead of taking the quick route, we were taking a few days to drive through the top part of Florida and explore some of that area. Our end destination for today was Panama City. The drive if we didn't stop would take about 5 hours, but we would be stopping at anything interesting that caught our eye along the way. We left New Orleans and had soon crossed the state border and we were now in Mississippi, the GPS let us know when we had moved onto a new state. We drove through Mississippi, not stopping and soon we were in Alabama. I did make it out of the car in Alabama, we stopped at a gas station to get gas, snacks and to use the bathrooms. My only real observation of Alabama were the gas station attendants were very friendly, must be a Southern thing. Not too long later we had crossed over into Florida. It had taken us about three and a bit hours.
We
soon saw a beach coming up ahead at Pensacola, so we headed there. Our first stop in Florida. This place was really busy. The car park for the beach was huge and really busy. Luckily, we managed to find a spot pretty easily. We headed down to the beach, it was packed. The beach as pretty nice, so you could see why it was popular. There were also some hotels built alongside the beach. We found a spot on the sand and flopped down to relax. I also dipped my toes in the water, it was warm! This was a good spot to spend a couple of hours chilling.
There was one food that we didn't have time to try in New Orleans, the Muffuletta. But since we had really wanted to try it, we had headed to Central Grocery and Deli on Decatur Street before we left to get one for our journey. Central Grocery and Deli is an old fashioned style store that was founded in 1906 by a Sicilian immigrant Salvatore Lupo. He is famous for creating the Muffuletta sandwich. The sandwich is made from a round Sicilian stlye sesame bread similar to a foccacia, but
lighter in texture, crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. The bread is like a giant bread bun and it is filled with marinated olive salad, mortadella, salami, mozzarella, ham and provolone. Since the sandwich is so big we shared one between us, but I think I could have eaten the whole thing, it was just so tasty. If I ever make it back to New Orleans, I would be heading straight back to the deli to get another one.
Our next stop was Eglin AFB Beach. We didn't intend to stop here, but it looked really pretty and since we had no set itinerary, we decided to explore. We parked up and headed down to the beach. This area was so different to Pensacola Beach, which had been rammed. It was really quiet here. There were only a few other people about and the beach looked deserted compared to Pensacola Beach. The beach was surrounded by dunes which were under environmental protection, I think. Some kind of animal(s) lived there and were being protected. The sand was a gorgeous light shade. I really wished we'd found this place earlier, as I would have preferred to relax
here for the afternoon instead. As we walked down to the beach, we watched the sunset. The sky was a gorgeous colour and it was a really beautiful sunset. I was a bit gutted though as my camera had died, meaning that I didn't get any photos of it. I wish I had been able to capture its beauty. After the sunset we got back on the road, we still had a couple of hour's worth of driving left to do. We arrived at Panama City pretty late. It was all dark outside, so we didn't see anything of the town. We drove to our hotel and quickly got checked-in. It wasn't the nicest place on earth, but fine for the night and not sharing a room with randoms is always a bonus for me. I think we were pretty much asleep not long after getting there as it was about midnight.
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