A Panama City Beach trip report

I have always looked to Intercot for some information on Panama City Beach, but there is not much on here, so I thought I would add my experience for anyone else poking around…

Me my DW and DS1½ traveled for our first big trip post-pregnancy to Panama City Beach on June 19 for 6 nights. We stayed at the Majestic Beach Resort (an Edgewater property). More on the condo later…

We have not been to PCB since all of the significant changes in PCB were completed. Many (but not all) of the motels & hotels have been replaced with huge condos with parking garages on the other side of Front Beach Road connected to the condos with a catwalk stretched over Front Beach Road. There are even several condos that have totally built on the non-beach side of the road, and you have to walk across the highway (no catwalks) and cross over another hotel's property just to get to the beach, which is something I will never do! I miss the smaller hotels, but at least there are now plenty of places to choose from for future trips.

The best change to come to PCB is the opening of the outdoor shopping complex called Pier Park. It is huge, spanning from Front Beach Road all the way back to Back Beach Road, which makes it over a half-a-mile long and nearly as wide. Being male, shopping is not a vacation destination for me, but Pier Park also has several sit-down party-restaurants, lots of junk food (Cookie Company, candy shops, etc…) and even a few carnival rides (you can ride the original Miracle Strip Carousal here). We ate at Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville and man-o-man, that really was the best Cheeseburger in Paradise!

When all of the construction started several years ago, I was worried that all of the shops along “the strip” would disappear, but it seemed like there was still some shops left along the original strip, even though the opening of Pier Park has definitely shifted the center of town further down the road towards Destin and away from the now-closed Miracle Strip Amusement Park. Shipwreck Island water park was still there, and it looked like their prices were lower than before. One disappointment was the obvious abandonment of several condo projects as the real estate market has collapsed. The old Tradewinds site, as well as the old Miracle Strip Amusement Park site were totally abandoned and the biggest eyesores, but there were probably a dozen other sites abandoned from one end of the strip to the other. They just let the grass grow up around the construction offices and the cranes are rusting away.

I guess the economy has taken somewhat of a toll on PCB, because each night we ate out betwen 4 and 5pm, and walked straight to our table everywhere except Margaritaville. Even at 4pm that was unheard of two years ago. It did seem though that if you waited until after 5, the crowds thickened up quiet a bit, especially at Margaritaville, which has two-hour waits at times. We always eat at Pineapple Willy’s, which sells the best quality t-shirts ever made, so we bought plenty of shirts and they served us way too much food, as always. We always eat at Angelo’s Steakhouse, and just as before, their steak is a slab of heaven and their bread is a slice of heaven, and the old man in the lobby is still a-kickin’. My mother-in-law was with us, and they like a small seafood place called Scampy’s, and it is good as well. Cici’s buffet pizza sure was good on arrival day too!

While the weather was perfect and the seaweed was tolerable, the condo left a sour taste in our mouth. The Majestic was really a nice looking facility, had 2 full-size pools with large steps for our little one, 2 hot tubs, 2 indoor pools, and a ½ foot deep kiddy pool, and were all well maintained. However, the tile floor in our room had a black film on it that wouldn’t come off with housekeeping’s mop, but would stick to our bare feet or our socks. The bathtub would turn black as coal if we didn’t wear slippers in the room, and of course my son refused to wear any socks or shoes in the room, so he looked like a little coal miner by the end of the day. This, along with a VERY large and VERY loud group of teens (I believe it was a church group that arrived in nine charter buses with about three adults and 300 hundred teens), was complained about to the front desk, but the customer service here was simply non-existent, and nothing was ever addressed. I will not be back here for sure!

Despite the condo disappointment, we loved the trip and continue to love our third home, Panama City Beach, despite all of the changes. Now we get to plan out next trip, which of course is WDW in June 2010 (Wahoo it’s less than a year, I should download the countdown clock) :yay:. We are already planning our next PCB trip too, and hope to figure out where the best new condos are within the next few trips. Anyone with a good experience at a condo on Front Beach Road, particularly close to Pier Park, let us all know!