Visiting Chase in Pensacola! by Kenny

Whoa Whoa Whoa! “First people to cross a what with a what?” Well your right – technically I don’t know if we were the first – but after googling it I couldn’t find any other claim so...idk. Dibs? We will dig in to this later – but here is how it happened… Since Kristen had started school and I had started my new job back in January, we haven’t had an opportunity to travel nearly as much. Being seasoned employees in a company does offer you a benefit of being a little more relaxed when you travel places but since we both started new things, we have not fully adjusted to our new schedules yet.  That being said, we have been working on it! And While Kristen had to take exams for a FULL week. I made plans to keep out of her hair so she could focus on her schooling and at the same time, I could try to make some time to visit some old friends.  It had been a while since I had seen my buddy Chase – we met in college and had all sorts of adventures – and it was time to catch up. He’s currently serving in the military Down in Florida so I reached out to see if he was free and if a reunion would be alright. He was totally down for a visit so I picked up a cheap flight to Pensacola and headed on down.  There were a lot of options for us to do – but the main purpose of this trip was really to spend some time with a good friend that I missed seeing and catching up on life. No big fancy excursions necessary – and that’s exactly what we did!  Pensacola is an awesome town and we were staying right downtown in his apartment. It was within walking distance to anything you needed. I was so impressed with this town honestly. You could walk in the middle of the street during the middle of the day because there was no traffic to worry about- yet the place was very lively (not that you’d want to walk down the middle of the street during the day – but the point is it was very pedestrian friendly). There was a lot of night life opportunities, ample restaurants with good food and plenty of parks and local activities. There was a football stadium within walking distance for some local colleges and a semi pro baseball team as well. It seems like there was a lot of work put in to make this place nice. During the visit we also took advantage of going to the beach – Pensacola Beach has some AWESOME shores. The water is super clear and calm because of the barrier islands around it. We caught (and released) a few crabs, saw some fish and were careful around the Jelly fish (you gotta watch out for these guys!) It seems like something is always going on around here – we found a Corvette Car meetup and took a stroll down the many isles of old and new corvettes (we are both car guys so it was a win). We also got pretty lucky to see the Naval Aviation museum as well with was awesome. So much to learn about and – PRO TIP: Chase loves taking some of these tours so I had a personal tour guide through a lot of it. I learned a lot about the area and its history from Chase while we toured this area along with some of the older civil war forts that we also explored.  Speaking of which, in order for us to explore one of these forts – well the remnants of one at least- we had to cross an international waterway to get to the island it was located on. Chase had mentioned he had been here before but he had a boat. In his words “It’s not too far, its close enough where you could probably swim across it…” Well that’s at least all I heard and I was immediately “Oh yeah no problem then, let’s just do that!” BUT it wasn’t that simple. I failed to hear the important part which was – this waterway is full of jelly fish. So we decided we could go to Walmart and get a blow up raft to paddle across. However we ended up with an air mattress because they were all sold out of rafts! This ended up being the better choice anyways because now you have something useful later when people come to visit – a place for them to sleep and also a raft in case they need that too! We made it across the waterway just fine and believe it or not we only got one jelly sting - a small bit on Chase’s foot – but considering he’s like 6’3” and I’m 5’11” AND we only had a twin size mattress, I’d say we did pretty darn good.  All in all, we had a great time hanging out and catching up and I would totally recommend going down this way if you are able. It’s pretty, very calm – and fully of activities no matter what you enjoy doing. Thanks for letting me visit Chase! Hopefully we can do it again soon!

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