Panama City

We had a short-ish drive day and wanted to enjoy every last minute of St. Andrews state park so we didn’t get gone till close to noon.  On the way out of Panama City we decided to take a chance at Dan-D-Donuts.  Supposedly they are the best donuts around and sell out fast.  Would there be any left at 12:30 in the afternoon?  We pulled onto a side street where Ava and the Beast were blocking an entire lane but, like the ancient Chinese proverb says, “when in pursuit of a donut let nothing stop you!”  No, that’s not really an ancient Chinese proverb…it’s a Huck proverb though.  The kids thought it was totally awesome that we were having donuts for lunch (I did too).  Were they good donuts? Yes.  Were they the best donuts? They were good donuts.  Dunkin’ Donuts used to have a donut called the Dutch Crumb.  And King Soopers has one, not sure what its really called, but the boys and I call it The Big Nasty.  The Dutch Crumb and The Big Nasty set the donut bar pretty high for me…I don’t think Dan-D quite made it over the bar.  It was a good donut though, and a lunch that I will remember for a long time!

We had heard great things about St. Andrews State Park from the Bareneckers.  They did have a little weather scare while they were there but surely that would not happen to us….right?

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Yikes! That was more excitement than I needed in one night! (And to explain our mental capacity or lack of: we had been up the night before with B whose final bout of sickness ended at 3:30am.) At 7pm Huck told me that there was a tornado warning. I looked it up and thought that’s fine, hopefully, surely we will have nothing to worry about. We’re right on the water -do tornadoes occur right on the water? We looked at the radar a couple times and it seemed like the worst and biggest part of the storm was past and the remaining bits would head north, so the storm would remain west of us. I had finally decided we were in the clear and we could rest easily. My head hit the pillow and minutes later our phones started going off and it was now “Extreme Alert – Tornado Warning in effect for the next 30 minutes or so.” Ok.

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We tend to like state parks.  We typically make travel days about 3 hours.  Put those two together and we targeted St. Andrews State Park in Panama City FL.  Plus I had read great things about the park and the area from the Bareneckers who we met back in Louisiana.  We called, got 3 nights reserved, put the hammer down and made it to our 7th state of the trip, FLORIDA!

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