Winter Paused in Pensacola

Santa Rosa Island's undulating dunes

Driving up Interstate 110, leaving Pensacola behind, the third track on Wilco’s Being There – Monday - suddenly wrapped our 48 hours in the Florida Panhandle. Coincidentally – I had forgotten the lyric about someone “down in Pensacola hiding from the snow.”

Snow didn’t blanket Nashville, just rapidly dropping temperatures that hit single digits on Monday morning. In Pensacola, when we left Seville Quarter around Sunday twilight, the bartender implored us to stay warm. The mercury had not fallen below 50 yet.

So went January days in Pensacola. Neither of us wore a jacket while in the City of Five Flags. Blue skies, blaring sun and 60-degree afternoons enliven us. In the depths of winter, we eagerly shed layers for Floridian winter.

We arrived to find Palafox Street buzzing with a festival crowd, its main commercial blocks thick with weekenders. A block away, everything felt deserted. The Tin Cow did not, but we found a table anyway. A design-your-own-burger joint, we winnowed the myriad choices down to a venison burger with a Sixpoint Sensi Wet Hop Ale for Nancy and a lamb burger with a Cigar City Jai Alai IPA for me.

Before checking into our rental, we crossed two spans to reach Santa Rosa Island, the outer barrier island and host of Pensacola Beach and much of Gulf Islands National Seashore.

A long line queued at the seashore guard shack, leading us to the protected beach east of the bridge.The dune ridges and gnarled vegetation cast an otherworldly feel. Only a few hundred yards of sandy island separates the bay from the gulf. The bone-white sand, mostly made of pulverized quartz, contrasts sharply with the turquoise Gulf waters.

With few people out, we had to roam. In the parking lot, a lone man looped around on a hoverboard, covering a few hundred feet in each revolution. I was tempted to ask the repetitive action was any fun, because it seemed like the least enjoyable activity bone-white beaches could offer. We rolled up our pants and lost our socks (Nancy had the foresight to pack sandals).

Nancy on Santa Rosa Beach

Above the tide line, the sand felt firmer than asphalt. Waves charged in. Although the air and sun warmed us significantly, the waves lashed our legs with chilly water. The unpredictability left me wet above the knees.

 A closed visitor center ended our stop at the Naval Live Oaks Reserve, a unit of the national seashore that includes an oak forest founded by President John Quincy Adams for naval shipbuilding purposes.

Still wet from the beach walk, we returned to the mainland to hunt down our accommodations. We rented a backyard cottage northeast of downtown, a little place among the palms and the owner’s gardens. We poured a glass of wine to inaugurate our stay. Through the night, we drew attention from the cat door at the rear of the main house. One, then two cats crammed into the space, watching our actions.

Seville Quarter

Dinner took us further out to O’Brien’s Bistro, a long-running eatery that specializes in seafood. With a French rose, we enjoyed a mixed grill of shrimp, scallops and tuna (Nancy) and lobster-stuff group (myself), both entrees served in a French white butter sauce. I would be negligent if I forgot O’Brien’s spectacular brie wheel with pecan sauce and bread pudding for dessert.

Sunday morning hit quickly. A bit of rain that intruded Saturday night vanished into a cloudless morning. After a quick coffee stop we returned to Santa Rosa Island, where Fort Pickens and more seashore awaited. Short, serrated rows of whitecaps covered Pensacola Bay, while gulf waves crashed placidly.

Fort Pickens corridors, arches

At the island's end, Fort Pickens is among the few Union forts in the Southeast never taken by the Confederates. An astute officer moved troops from other nearby forts to the more defensible Fort Pickens, which held its own through multiple attacks.

Following the Indian Wars, the fort briefly imprisoned Geronimo and his band of Chiricahua Apache, where they labored on the fort before evacuation to Mobile due to a yellow fever scare. It's hard to imagine a more alien place to the desert-dwelling Apache than a humid island surrounded by water on three sides.

Inside the masonry fort lies a black-metal battery built as technology advanced - they took layers off the fort walls as the masonry structures became obsolete. The five-sided fort is missing a chunk due to a fire that reached stored powder and blew out a chunk of the wall, sending debris across the bay.

Walls of Fort Pickens

The building holds history in every corner, from the cistern that supplied water to vaulted chambers that once housed officers. A park ranger pointed out a seldom-seen feature, a windowsill where the staff doctor carved him name into the brick. The park doesn’t advertise its location because the rangers found it a few years ago and want to figure out how to best protect it.

Many abandoned fortifications and gun batteries dotted the west end of Santa Rosa Island. Sand and shrubs turn them into giant dunes, only metal hatches and railings giving some away. We toured one, which had a giant cannon that gears raised and lowered.

The fine sand makes for easy erosion. During Fort Pickens’ heyday, the walls sat a few hundred feet from the waters. Winds and waves perpetually sculpt the island, tearing down and building up.

As the crow flies, Fort Pickens and Fort Barrancas sit across the bay. In a car, visiting both requires driving around the bay, back through downtown and entering Naval Air Station Pensacola (NASP), the nation’s first and home of the Blue Angels.

Yes, this flew at one time

The first U.S. lighthouse built on the Florida coast towers over the station, Fort Barrancas (originally built by the Spanish) and the National Naval Aviation Museum. Visitors must cross a security checkpoint, but it’s a pretty casual stop – the guard looked at my license, asked where we were headed and affably offered directions once he found out we had not visited before.

Once flown by George H.W. Bush

We skipped the fort and went for the museum. The halls boast an intimidating collection of aircraft, from oddballs only a few years distant from the Wright Brothers to the historical planes – a trainer flown by cadet George H.W. Bush, a Marine One helicopter from the Nixon era, an Apollo landing replica, the Curtiss NC-4 (first aircraft to cross the Atlantic, albeit with many stops) and the S-3 Viking that ferried a younger George Bush to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

The history on display is spectacular – rich stories envelope every plane. Walking the museum’s main floor, which covers planes up to World War II, aircraft evolution unfolds from wooden to propellers and engines that grew larger and more numerous until compact jet turbines overtook them. At the entrance, a series of models trace the origins of naval aircraft carriers from steamer ships to modified oil tankers to today’s floating cities.

First sip of Jarritos

Hungry as we were, downtown offer a simple choice in Al Fresco Pensacola, which hosts five restaurants in Airstream trailers and a courtyard on a palm-covered lot. Choices included Asian cuisine, grilled cheese, barbecue, oysters and Z Mexican – we picked the latter, washing down tacos with Jarritos.

Posing with the orange tree

Off Palafox, Pensacola’s historic districts are easily walkable. The Historic Pensacola District has a large share of older buildings.. More importantly, the district hosts Nancy’s all-time favorite tree, a giant orange tree. Protected by a picket fence, the lone tree tantalizes passersby.

The University of West Florida administers many of the historic buildings as museum. Sprinkled among there are some small businesses. Across the street from the orange tree, a modest brick building houses the Pensacola Bay Brewing Company.

In attempting to have a beer at the brewery, we stumbled into a Mardi Gras celebration on an adjacent city square. New Orleans jazz echoes from the square’s gazebo. The party crowd spilled over into the brewery so we decided to wander the historic districts. New Orleans isn't the only place where masks and king cakes rule the weeks leading to Ash Wednesday. The same culture has deep roots in Pensacola.

In the Seville Quarter, a Victorian building with rooms that feel like separate bars, we wound up shooting several games of pool. My surgically repaired left arm had no impact on my shoddy aim.

With sunset nearing, we briskly walked to Plaza de Luna, the square at the end of Palafox that opens onto the bay. The plaza honors Don Tristan de Luna y Arellano, the conquistador who founded the Spanish colony at Pensacola in 1559, the site of which archaeologists just rediscovered in 2015.

People milled around the plaza, some fishing, some watching the sunset like us. A great blue heron squawked and put on an aerial show before posing on a metal post. Pelicans cruised just above the water as pigeons cooed in the crevasses below the bayside railing.

Dwarfing Plaza de Luna was the Nor Goliath, a massive construction ship used to assemble oil platforms and other offshore structures. The vessel was undergoing a refit in Pensacola, occupying much of the city’s port.

NOR Goliath at sunset

On this night, they were inseparable. A statue of Don Tristan gleamed in the day’s remaining sunlight. A spectacle of colors hit the plaza as the sun slid behind the lighthouse and bends of the gulf coast. In the sunset, the ship’s blue hull also took on red flourishes.

We walked back to the historic district, the orange tree now illuminated by floodlights to dissuade anyone who might partake in its fruit. The brewery calmed a little, so we took our wheat beers to the patio and let the beauty of the orange tree fill in any conversation gaps.

Leaving so soon?

 Awakened by a rooster Monday morning, I decided to walk the neighborhood before we split. I opened the door to a cat observing me from a raised garden bed. A second lurked behind me. I called to Nancy outside, and the owner’s cats swarmed us for pets. I walked a circle through the neighborhood, finding the rooster's home as part of an unfenced flock of chickens loitering in a yard. Before long we packed and the cats monitored us from their windows one last time.

The last task in Pensacola involved an empty cooler and a visit to Joe Patti’s. The bustling seafood market presented too many choices for filling that cooler, but we narrowed it to Gulf group, red snapper, red fish, Alaskan salmon and a pound of alligator meat.

Joe Patti's also fried up beignets and served decent coffee, so we adjourned to Plaza de Luna for a last meal overlooking Pensacola Bay, chewing a little. The birds ruled bay and the sun overruled any chill in the air. Freezing temps would await us in Nashville, but few places beat Pensacola in putting winter on hold for a few days.

Posing with a Fort Pickens cannon