Most of the snowbirds and spring breakers who flock here to the Emerald Coast near Destin, FL don’t arrive until mid-March when average high temps rise into the upper 60’s/low 70’s.
My folks play a different angle. They rent a spacious apartment above a pristine beach on Okaloosa Island during the month of February (and the first week of March) when the fee is about half the cost of staying in these parts during peak tourist season.
Since baking in a hot sun is no longer part of their routine, they successfully manage to escape the snow and cold of suburban Chicago for five weeks without paying through the nose. They take long walks along the Gulf of Mexico. They go to restaurants that aren’t yet crowded with visitors. And they sit on their fifth floor balcony and watch surfer guys in wetsuits try to catch a wave. It’s usually not balmy when they’re here but it’s not bad. Low to mid 60’a in the daytime. Brisk at night.
It’s another stop on their retirement enjoyment tour. Now a good decade in progress, my parents have had a good ride since walking away intact from their respective careers.
Their rental apartment on Okaloosa Isle has all sorts of extra room to crash so I decided to drop in on them Tuesday. After a three and a half hour flight to Houston, I jumped on a one hour connecting trip to the commercial airport adjoining Eglin Air Force Base in Valparaiso, FL. Aside from its convenient location, the best part of flying in and out of Northwest Florida Regional Airport is the visual access you get to an otherwise off-limits military installation. As one’s commercial flight taxis to the gate after landing, you pass by hundreds of millions of dollars worth of US military aircraft. Fighter jets are parked in small, individual hangars without doors and huge transport craft can be seen too.
The thundering crackles of F-16 engines gunning in and out of Eglin can be heard if you spend anytime outdoors here.
Florida’s high school basketball season wraps up this weekend with title games in Lakeland, but baseball is in full swing despite its “spring” season designation. We took in a contest Tuesday night at Daniel Bohannon Field on the campus of Fort Walton Beach High School. The 630 PM start time was set late to accommodate the hour and fifteen minute bus ride for opponent Mosley HS located in Lynn Haven near Panama City.
A couple hundred people filled the home side’s bleachers despite a stiff wind and temps in the low 50’s. Mosley routed Fort Walton 10-2. Lanky starting pitcher Andrew Duramo struck out nine for Mosley. After the home plate ump changed his ruling from a foul tip to a hit by pitch during a Fort Walton rally effort in the bottom of the fourth, a handful of fans from Mosley howled in protest. The catcalls aimed at the home plate ump were more aggressive than the situation called for given the bang-bang nature of the original call and the wide discrepancy in the score at the time. Interestingly, those leading the harassment of the home plate ump after the reversal were confronted by fans of the home team. “Way to be a good role model for the kids,” said one adult supporting Fort Walton. After a few exchanges along these lines, the shouting stopped. It was awkward to hear parents arguing with each other at a high school event but it was an excellent example of the long width on the adult behavioral spectrum when games are viewed as something more than they are.
A four-dollar admission charge was collected at a card table set up on sandy ground behind a permanent concrete structure that housed the ballpark’s concession stand and press box. Among the food items being sold was “homemade” hot chili and fried chicken sandwiches.
We had dinner before the game at Stewby’s Seafood Shanty on Racetrack Road in Fort Walton. The restaurant is housed in a modified portable school classroom and serves Gulf seafood caught from fishing boats based in Destin. I had the grilled “fish of the day” platter. Four small pieces of delicious grilled amberjack were served on a plastic plate with hush puppies and a couple lemon wedges. It was fantastic. After we finished our meal, the restaurant’s young proprietor Stewart Taylor stopped by our table and asked how everything was. Taylor’s father Sam ran a popular seafood restaurant in the area spanning three decades before dying in 1985. Backed with the deep knowledge of his father’s enterprise, Stewby is running a great little place that I would highly recommend if you ever find yourself in the Fort Walton area.
On Wednesday afternoon, we saw the matinee showing of Zero Dark Thirty at the Regal Sun Plaza Stadium 8 in Fort Walton Beach. My first reaction to the 157-minute portrayal of the CIA’s hunt for bin Laden is that conservatives had no good reason to complain the movie’s release was timed to help Obama’s re-election chances.
The film does no real favors for the President. The systematic use of torture under GWB’s leadership in the aftermath of 9/11 may have been curtailed by a leader deemed more progressive but most movie-goers know the capture and assassination of OBL came after a decade of chasing intelligence by an infrastructure that included oversight by Obama’s predecessor in the White House. Assuming the real-life facts assembled as a composite story in Zero Dark are true, partial credit for the take-down of number one on the hit list spans the reigns of both commanders.
The film’s best sequence is a well-done piece of Hollywood dazzle. The audience is pulled to seat’s edge as the Black Hawks charge into Pakistan and the Seals enter a compound that matches the pictures that were fed to us when news of the mission was disseminated.
I thought Zero Dark was a better film than Argo although Kathryn Bigelow’s use of actors Jennifer Ehle as a top intelligence official and Jim Gandolfini as Leon Panetta were cringe-inducing.
The street scenes in Pakistan appear authentic given they were shot in India. The movie ends without any depiction of the disposal of OBL’s body. Among the many questions the movie provoked in my mind is how the US managed to pull off an attack deep in the heart of Pakistan without immediate efforts to stop it by the home turf’s military/security. The forty minutes or so needed to complete the mission would have surely been too much to ask for in most well-fortified sovereign lands and so that aspect of the attack strikes me as hard to believe.