Local Lifestyle: The Florida Panhandle

There’s a lot of different sayings about the Florida Panhandle in relation to the rest of Florida. For example: North-West Florida is basically an extension of Alabama. And I guess I can agree. There’s not really a difference between the people here and the people in South Alabama—Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Foley, etcetera. Another example: The further South you travel in Florida, the more “North” it gets. Or perhaps a better way to phrase that is, “The more North you travel, the more ‘South’ it gets.” And I absolutely agree with that example.

Here in the Florida Panhandle, we don’t have any “major” cities like Orlando, Tampa, and Miami. We’re mostly beaches and backroads. We also have some pretty interesting events that happen yearly, and even seasonally, such as Mullet Toss Weekend and the Five Flags Speedway races. Pensacola is also home to the Blue Angels, or as most of us here call them, the Blues (as well as Fat Albert). But I’ll get into all of that in later posts.

Over to the East, the Florida Panhandle has other towns such as Gulf Breeze, Navarre, Fort Walton Beach, Destin, Seaside, and Panama City Beach. Most of these towns, along with Pensacola, are vacation towns. Between Navarre and Fort Walton Beach, lies Crab Island, a very popular boating destination. The movie The Truman Show (1998) was filmed in Seaside. And every year in May, Panama City Beach hosts Florida Jeep Jam.

The Florida Panhandle also is a hot-spot for hurricanes during hurricane season, which lasts from June 1 to November 10. Really, the whole Gulf Coast is. There’s actually a Category 4 hurricane brewing in the Gulf of Mexico right now.

Aside from hurricane season, I would say the Florida Panhandle is a pretty interesting place to live. What’s next on your to-do list? I think I might hit the beach on our next sunny day.