our first attempt at relaxing and doing nothing!

After so many days of visiting people and being here there and everywhere, Alan and I decided to try doing virtually nothing, with no plans and no need to look at our watches or meet any deadlines.  I feel we did fairly well.  The first thing we had to do in order to accomplish this was to change our plans for Monday!

We intended to take a dolphin cruise and then drop in at our friends, John and Louanne's house.  But we didn't do this!  Sadly, it meant we will have to wait until our next trip to this area to be able to visit the famous balcony where John posts his "beach reports".   But I hope they understood we just needed some only us time.

Looking across the Bay, there is Harbour Walk, Destin!

Monday we went under Brooks Bridge on the Fort Walton Beach side.  The sunrise was gorgeous and it is such a positive way to use the fact that we continue to waken up too early.  I guess you could say we are still a bit on Scottish time!

What can I say about how beautiful this is?

After sunrise,  it was too early to start shopping but we also needed to find the recycling place for all our bottles, cans and paper collected during our stay.  After so many years of serious recycling in Scotland, we just could not force ourselves to simply put them in the trash.  It was difficult to find these bins and no one we asked knew where they would be either. So we had to resort to going to McDonalds for a second breakfast just to use their internet!  Turned out, the place we were looking for was in the Landing Park, virtually next to where we were staying!

Once we did our "civic duty" we took a long time to just smell the roses. Well, no roses were near this park, but we sat on a bench on a dock and watched the water roll by, along with various types of boats and the people in them.  It was wonderful.  Why didn't we do this more often?  Why wait til almost the last day to find this peace?  Story of our lives, but maybe when I read this before returning to Fort Walton, I will remember and we will start as we mean to continue! Here are a few photos from then:

Looked like he just rowed in for a paper and a coffee!

A different view of Steamboat Landing from the Landing!
The white buildings...

Did I mention watching the dogs too?
They were having so much fun!

After this peaceful start to the day, we headed off the Silver Sands Premium Outlets. We have been so busy this trip we have not really shopped at all.  Not like us but we have been too busy having fun and catching up with friends so compressed shopping time is a small price to pay!

Loaded Potato Skins

Since shopping is serious business, we had to have an unexpected lunch break at Cheeseburger in Paradise, another of Jimmy Buffet's restaurants, or at least it used to be.  According to our server, he sold the chain a while ago, but it still feels authentically Jimmy Buffet and the menu is fabulous!  One of our favourite places (again). This is beginning to feel like a Buffet family tribute eating tour!  We didn't mean to fill ourselves up and only ordered an appetiser called Loaded Potato Chips. These were really fantastic potato chips (or crisps if you are British - similar to Kettle Crisps), with sour cream, green onions, tomatoes, melted cheese and chopped bacon.  Thank goodness we split an order because it filled us up so much, we could not eat any more for dinner later!

On the way back to Steamboat, we stopped at the harbour and had great timing!  Some charter fishing boats had arrived and it was really interesting to see the fish they brought in!

4 Amberjack and 1 Barracuda

Then it was time to stop at Margaritaville to refresh ourselves with a non-alcoholic daiquiri sitting  at our "local" on our regular seats and watching the boat traffic again.  Such a peaceful and beautiful place to recharge our batteries.

"On the beach, you can live in bliss."

 Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys