Destin Florida – Day 1

My family and I decided to make a trip down to Florida for Christmas this year to visit with family. We have just spent our first full day in Destin, Fl (or at least the general area). I’m going to let you all know about where we are staying and the places we are seeing and eating at this week. I’ll start by saying it’ absolutely beautiful down here even with the cold weather (yes, it gets cold down here in Florida). So with all the beauty surrounding us it’s hard to write a bad review, but some stuff (or at least customer service or lack of) is meant for a bad review.

So I’ll start by telling you all about where we are staying. We are staying at The Palms of Destin. We have a beautiful condo, but we ran into some issues getting into our condo. We arrived last night at around 6:30pm with an email with instructions to check in at the front desk for our keys. We went in to get our keys and they had no record of our reservation (after paying a good sum a money for our condo and driving over 8 hours this is not what I wanted to hear). I show them my emails with the company I reserved the condo through and called the reservation company. At this point it was a blame game of the reservation company saying the resort is notorious for being disorganized and losing things and the resort blaming the reservation company for never sending it. I don’t care whose fault it was we were a tired and cold family (did I mention it’s actually cold in Destin right now?) who just wanted to get settled into our condo. The front desk clerk wasn’t exactly the most friendly person in the world. With some heavy sighs (from all of us) and some phone calls she said she could allow us to have our keys for the evening (and hope the condo was clean) and we could finish our check-in in the morning. So we said fine and let her walk us up to our condo so she could let us in while our keys were being activated (which didn’t happen until around midnight).

We get to our condo and it is beautiful. Large 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom with a fully stocked kitchen, comfortable king size bed, ocean view with large balcony. We are happy. The only complaint we have about the condo itself is the water. We turned on the hot water to a rotten egg smell (yup, sulfur water). So if that’s the only problem we have with the condo this week we can live with that. I did officially check in this morning and the front desk clerk this morning was equally unpleasant as the one last night. Got on the phone with her supervisor with a somewhat snarky tone asking about our situation. There were a few eyerolls and giggles during that phone conversation that were less than professional. But whatever, we are in our condo for the week and all is well for now. We haven’t even had time to visit the resort amenities (which I’ll write about as I get to them).

We did however visit two beautiful beaches today. The first one was Henderson Beach State Park (which is right across the street from our condo). We had to pay $6 to park our car over there (we would have walked had we known that). The beach was absolutely beautiful. White sand, crystal clear water. With it being winter there were very few people on the beach freezing in the wind with us. The next beach we drove to with the rest of my family (which lives here) was Navarre Beach. This beach was AMAZING. Secluded with no high rises. White (I’m talking snow white) sand and beautiful water. If it hadn’t been so cold I would have jumped in the water. Navarre Beach is a beach you don’t want to miss if you are staying in the Panhandle of Florida. Breathtaking and words can’t possibly describe the beauty. So I’ll share a few pictures of our day.