Navarre Beach bike ride -- Navarre, Florida

For our Florida ride, we really wanted one that would follow along the beach, much like our seawall ride in Galveston.  We found the Santa Rosa County Loop Trail in Navarre Beach that sounded like it would be awesome with a path that supposedly ran right along the coast with "gulf views".

I think we were both disappointed with what this ended up being. There was little to no ocean view.

There was a view of a plethora of funky and colorful beach houses (and who doesn't love that??) I do, I really do.

The purple house made me happy.  Go Cats!  I'll let my kids figure out if I mean Bearcats or Wildcats.

And, of course.... being the Mellencamp fan that I am, how could I not love this?

This was just bizarre.

As was this, really.  A beachfront brick house on stilts.

There was also a Kansas street sign..... ahem, after the tall guy modified it to say that for this photo-op, anyway.  :)

And a cute little palm oasis for us to take our picture with.

But.....  as much I liked the varied and colorful architecture of all the laid back beach properties, I really wanted to see the ocean as I rode along. You do not see that on the Navarre Beach portion of this path.  At all. And when we reached the end of the bike path at the point Navarre Beach ended and the National Seashore area began, the path became a bike lane on the shoulder of the 35 mile per hour highway.

Neither one of us is interested in road cycling.  We really only want paths and trails that have no vehicular traffic.  We thought maybe the path started up again at some point farther on down the road, based on what we had read on the website, so we decided to ride back to our car and drive to see if we could find that.

We ended up having a beautiful 7 mile drive through the Gulf Shore National Seashore until that turned into Pensacola Beach.

 That 7 mile drive included a bike lane on the shoulder of the highway all along that portion of the drive and we did encounter some hardy souls riding their bikes.  But it was hot, and while there were many opportunities to have an unobstructed ocean view, there were also many times, especially if you were on a bike, you would have had to crane your neck to try to see the water beyond the dunes. 

We were glad we had decided to not attempt that ride.  And we never did find where a path might have started up again once it became Pensacola, but we also didn't look too hard.  Once we hit Pensacola, it became a beach traffic zoo.  It was a Saturday afternoon in June at the beach and there were a lot of people. 

So, our beach ride was a bit of a disappointment to both of us.

But, we were able to score another June Ride and Seek Challenge score: "Boat in water"

And hey, a day at the beach is, well........ still a day at the beach.  So how disappointing can it really be? :)

Pictures of us on the beach for posterity.  

Awwwwwww............

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