Panama City Beach

Pristine beauty right across the street from where we stayed.

Perhaps the greatest part about Blue Horizon was its placement. I really liked the way that it was on the outskirts of Panama City Beach, so there were no giant hotels blocking our ocean view. The beaches were bare and clean...ahhh...it was great. We loved our secluded little spot. (Well, most of us did.)

Joe and Sarah come up from the beach. (Photo Courtesy of Bryon Farris)

Here you see the main path to the beach from our lodge. We spent most of the day going up and down this path. You would never fail to meet someone on your way to/from the beach while going this way to cross the street.

Once you exited our little walkway, this is what your eyes beheld. Ah, vacation... A beautiful view of the ocean...and the street.

Mrs. Willars and Linda squint at the camera from beneath the 'Cabana' (Photo Courtesy of Bryon Farris)

Here is where you found a sponsor. Beneath the 'Cabana' as they called it. Mrs. Willars faithfully endured the harsh ocean breezes and semi-tropical sun in order to amply supply us with sunscreen and sponsorship.

Yes sir, Mrs. Willars and the other sponsors had a hard life of watching us teenagers have fun on the beach. I mean, look at the barren landscape they had to endure!

A pitifully beautiful beachscape.

Of course, we had a terrible time of it, too. We had to find things to entertain ourselves...like soccer on the beach... ...sunning ourselves...

...wakeboarding...
Joey shows his stuff on the wake board he bought. This baby entertained a lot of us for hours. I think Christen and Clint held the record for the longest ride.

I gave it a few tries as well.

Joey carefully pulls the wakeboard from the sand. If you did it too quickly, a stuck wakeboard could break in half.

I think Joey wins the 'Style Award'

Jon and Daniel gear up for our snorkelling adventure.

...snorkelling...

The water wasn't the clearest in the world...

...but the sites... ...were definitely worth it!

And we definitely had a fun time of it!

A live sanddollar. There were tons of these about this size all over the place.
Here's a small dead one I found to give to Annavette because she asked me to get her one after I returned from the scuba diving trip with Jon bringing the 6 incher I found there.

Like I said, there were small live sanddollars all over the place!

It was really cool to see the paths they moved along during the day.

There were lots of jellyfish, too. They were really neat and squishy, but they don't turn out well on film.

We had a good time of it.

Daniel swimming in the pool. This shot was taking when we went to the Sandpiper resorts or something like that. We went to that place because supposedly it had a better beach. I liked our less-crowded beach better. (Photo Courtesy of Bryon Farris)

...swimming...

...even so bored as to having to start digging holes in the dirt...
And this is Daniel's SMALL hole! (Photo Courtesy of Bryon Farris

...ah...I miss it!

...sigh...

Here you see a sandcastle that a church group that came to Blue Horizon Resorts the last couple of days we were there built. We ourselves never really got around to building a sandcastle, which was too bad in my opinion. I was about to start one when Phil showed up with the Power Kite...

A hermit crab in my facemask.
Here's a good shot of my goggles and snorkel but a bad shot of the hermit crab crawling around in my goggles.

I did get to see a pelican fishing when hardly anyone else was on the beach. I tried to get a few action shots of it diving into the water, but this turned out to be very difficult and almost impossible with my dinky underwater camera. But, here's the pictures:

The pelican swoops down to its unwary prey below!

These photos do no good at all in showing the immensity of these birds. Look at this! It looks just about the same size as a sea gull in this picture!

Of course, one of my favorite things to do is walk the beach at night. Florida had just come out of a cold spell, though, so the nights were very chilly. And if you've never been on a beach, that means the sand was FREEZING! Unfortunately, that also meant all the sand crabs stayed in their holes. This was too bad because I had wanted to have crab races. (On the other hand, it seemed to be mating season for the crabs in the water. There were TONS of them, usually about six to eight inches across (including legs).) You had to have a sponsor with you, but it was worth the price to pay to go walk on the beach at night...

Of course, it's also a great place to sit and look at the stars as these couples are doing here.

Jon and I got the grand idea of going gigging. However, it was too cold and we didn't have a big enough light. I did spear a crab, however. Turns out the thing had a million eggs underneath it and I felt poorly for a little while afterwards. (Photo Courtesy of Bryon Farris, bubbles by Jared Blakely)

Back to Main Page Internet Empire HQ Posted July 2002