Tag: vacation

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News News Blog

Q1-2022 Tourism Numbers Point to Rebound

(Photo: Memphis Tourism)

It looks like out-of-towners just can’t get enough of Beale Street and barbecue this year. A recent report by Memphis Tourism shows that tourism numbers aren’t just thriving in the first quarter of 2022, but in some cases are up from 2019 pre-pandemic highs.

According to Memphis Tourism, Q1 of this year has seen more than 900,000 hotel room nights sold to visitors, which outperforms quarterly 2019 demand trends by 2.5 percent within the city limits. That figure is also 19.8 percent more rooms sold, year-over-year, in comparison to 2021.

“The resilience of our local hospitality industry has kept our tourism economy moving in the most challenging of times and we are seeing a sustained rebound,” said Kevin Kane, president and CEO of Memphis Tourism. “The diversity of attractions and activities, along with the drivability and affordability of the Memphis destination have truly given us momentum, putting us in a strong position, often ahead of the national average on hotel occupancy.”

Broadening to the whole of Shelby County, hotels are only one percentage point behind 2019 demand levels for Q1-2022. But that’s a 20.2 percent increase in the same time frame from 2021.

“As an organization dedicated to encouraging travel, the pandemic presented unique challenges in promoting Memphis as a leisure travel and meetings destination,” said Regena Bearden, chief marketing officer for Memphis Tourism. “Our message to visitors was about their personal level of comfort. We never went dark on our marketing efforts and our ‘When You’re Ready to Rock, We’ll be Ready to Roll’ campaign kept us on the radar of travelers. That really set the tone for our destination and as restrictions eased, we started to see hotel occupancy rise and that has continued through Q1 of 2022.”

Memphis Tourism made the announcement in concurrence with National Travel and Tourism Week, an annual celebration of contributions of the U.S. travel industry. As part of the celebrations, the Renasant Convention Center will host TravelCon, a three-day conference from April 29 to May 1, which is set to bring 50+ speakers, 40 sponsors, and 600 attendees to Memphis.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953/1978; dir. Jacques Tati)—It’s finally summer time, which means it’s finally time for you ditch your job for a while and have a little fun in the sun. Yet in today’s entertainment- and distraction-crazed modern world, trying to have fun is often as spirit-trampling as several weekends’ worth of unpaid overtime. For far too many people, Gang of Four’s question remains unanswerable: “The problem of leisure/what to do for pleasure?”

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Jacques Tati’s take on the agonies of vacation, accurately diagnoses this condition. His film also offers some potential remedies—but he’d never dream of telling you which set pieces represent the problem and which ones represent the way out. Tati’s sweetly funny, discreetly melancholy second feature also introduces the heroically indifferent Mr. Hulot (played by Tati himself)—an inscrutable middle-aged Frenchman loved by children, tolerated by dogs and almost always out of step with the uptight, status-conscious, overly busy, overly bourgie adults around him. Hulot says maybe two dozen words during the film, but his tottering, stiff-legged physical comedy mirrors the sheepish timidity and brazen entitlement in foreign places that distinguish tourists from locals the world over. Mr. Hulot’s Holiday is also an epic of absent-mindedness and misunderstanding; it unfolds in a sunny climate but is aided by a steady drizzle of visual and auditory jokes that don’t register as jokes until you’ve watched the movie a half-dozen times. (One of my favorite gags relies on the Orion’s-belt symmetry of a phonograph record, the back of Hulot’s head, and a piano stool.) Just like your own vacation, it’s restorative and boring and aimless and overplanned and too long and not long enough.
Grade: A

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Opinion The BruceV Blog

Dauphin Island Getaway

So I spent last week with the fam on Dauphin Island, just off the coast of Alabama. If you like white beaches with lots of people and tons of touristy restaurants and bars, I would recommend you NOT go there. Dauphin Island, we discovered, is much funkier and quieter. The water isn’t blue; it’s brownish green — you know, like the ocean. The sand is nice and the beaches are amazingly uncrowded. There are several nature and bird sanctuaries, a wonderful estuarium/aquarium, and a national wildlife refuge full of gators and herons and pelicans and redfish.

We rented a house on the bay side, bikes and a kayak, and parked the car for most of the week. There is one grocery store and about six restaurants — three of which suck mightily (Oar House, I’m looking at you). But there is a fresh seafood store, which offers just-off-the-boat shrimp, snapper, etc. and a wonderful bakery that has great bread and pastries and sandwiches. We cooked at “home” often.

And now, yes, vacation pictures. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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This a “goat tree,” so-called because local goats used to climb in them to escape alligators.

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View to the Little Dauphin Island National Wildlife Refuge

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Shot from the Mobile Bay Ferry to Fort Morgan

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Fort Morgan

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Rain over Dauphin Island. Shot from the ferry on our return trip.

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The Isle Dauphine club. Once, back when the Jetsons were members, no doubt a swank place. Now a funky swimming/dining facility open to the public.

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Sunrise over Dauphin Bay, from our deck.

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Spousal unit and stepson, post-red snapper fishing expedition.

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Buried alive.

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Our incredibly crowded beach.

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Sunset from the Club Dauphine on our last night.

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News

Cabin Fever

CREDIT: DVEST | dreamstime.com

Green Getaway

With a gallon of gas priced nearly as high as a gallon of milk, city dwellers won’t be taking many road trips this summer. But the cabins at Meeman-Shelby State Park offer an escape for Memphians looking to preserve petro.

Located in a heavily wooded area on the shore of the 135-acre Poplar Tree Lake, six vacation cabins offer all the features of typical hotel rooms (beds, linens, color TVs), plus complete kitchens with full-sized stoves and refrigerators. Each cabin has one double bed, two single beds, and two rollaway beds, a DVD/VCR unit, a stand-up shower, and a fireplace.

Grills and picnic tables are located outside the cabins, and guests have free access to the nearby pool. Cabin renters may also fish in Poplar Tree Lake without a state lake permit.

Cabins are open year-round, but guests are encouraged to book as far in advance as possible. During prime rental months (April through October), there is a five-night minimum stay requirement.

Pets are only allowed in one pet-friendly cabin, and there is a $10 charge per pet, per night. Though Fido can come along, be sure to leave the booze at home. No alcohol is allowed on state park grounds.

“We’re 13,000 acres of everything but city,” says park manager Steve Smith. “There’s fishing, biking, boating, swimming, disc golf … basically anything you want in a park except horseback riding. We don’t allow that.”

— Bianca Phillips

To make reservations, call 1-800-471-5293.

If You Build It

Wondering what to do with your spare time this summer? Why not roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty? If you’ve got some extra cash and an empty plot of land, you can build your own cabin.

Southland Log Homes, America’s largest log home company, has a model cabin and sales office in Lakeland, and they offer build-your-own cabin kits.

You can choose from more than 30 floor plans or custom-design your own dream cabin. “You pay for the log package — the structure of the house — and we can ship it anywhere in the U.S.,” says Nick Levin, sales consultant for Southland Log Homes.

Cabin materials run as low as $30,000, but the price varies depending on size and design. The logs come pre-cut and numbered, so building a cabin is like putting together a great big puzzle.

“Any person who is physically able to build a home can do this without having to measure and cut,” Levin says. “The cabin goes up perfectly and with ease.”

The kit comes with instructions, called a log overlay. “It’s like a page-by-page blueprint,” Levin says. “It tells you exactly what log goes where and what bundle the log is in.”

You stack the logs and fasten them with “log hogs.” which are screws that hold the logs together. You’re responsible for electricity and plumbing.

Southland offers a home-planning guide on their website and includes a lifetime guarantee on all materials. They will build the cabin for you, but where’s the fun in that? Especially when you can do it yourself and forever revel in your glory. — Shara Clark

For more information, go to southlandloghomes.com.

You Can’t Lose in Wynne

At least two things have happened in Wynne, Arkansas. One of them was D’Angelo Williams, who cut and sprinted his way from Wynne to the University of Memphis on his way to the NFL. The other thing happened long before D’Angelo, and before Wynne became Wynne, for that matter. It is the geological feature known as Crowley Ridge. It pushed itself up through the Earth 1,000 years ago to demarcate the alluvial plain known as the Delta. Nestled among Crowley Ridge’s gently rolling, lushly forested hills is Village Creek State Park.

Located an hour west of Memphis off I-40, Village Creek is an angler’s, hiker’s, history buff’s, and horseback rider’s dream. The park includes a stretch of the Trail of Tears, where thousands of displaced Native Americans passed on their way from fertile Eastern lands to barren Western reservations. The trail is cut deeply into the ground in the forest, which some have called the most dramatic and authentic spot along the trail. It appears much as it did nearly two centuries ago when the Indian Removal Act initiated the relocation. A rainbow of fish will practically jump into your boat from the park’s two lakes. Horses are every bit as welcome at the park as their two-legged masters. Village Creek has 30 horse camps equipped with washing bays and stables, as well as many miles of horse trails. You can also visit the park’s interpretive center, then hike or bike its trails.

Over-nighters can opt to camp, but 10 cabins are also available. They offer amenities ranging from screened-in porches with forest views to functional kitchens. You can even put rocks in your pillow to re-create the camping experience. Remember, you can’t lose in Wynne.

— Preston Lauterbach

For more information, call 870-238-9406.

Try the Pie

There are so many wonderful reasons to visit Buffalo, Tennessee, an unincorporated strip of trees and truck stops off I-40 just east of the Tennessee River. For starters, there’s Loretta Lynn’s Dude Ranch, home to the queen of country music and all of her queenly memorabilia. Then, of course, there’s the Arby’s and the Pilot station and a mobile home that doubles as either a real-estate mart or a barbecue joint (or maybe both, it’s hard to say). And the … um. Okay, the fact of the matter is, unless your gas tank is empty, your bladder is full, or you’re a big fan of Ms. Loretta, there’s only one good reason to tour Exit 143: the Log Cabin restaurant.

Built nearly 100 years ago from 10-inch hickory logs and originally used as a private residence, the Log Cabin has been serving up monster-sized country breakfasts, juicy steaks, mouth-watering pork chops, and massive platters of deep-fried heaven since 1966. The vibe is friendly. The décor is fireplaces and animal heads.

Adventurous diners may want to forgo the Log Cabin’s typical fare and go straight for the Southern exotica. The frog-leg platter comes with four pairs of impossibly crispy hoppers served with baked potato, white beans, and slaw. You’ll want to order a tooth-achingly sweet side of baked apples to go with it. The Cabin’s mountainous pile of perfectly fried golf-ball-sized chicken livers is also notable and pair excellently with baked apples and okra.

No visit to the Log Cabin restaurant is complete without dessert. The carrot and chocolate cakes are hard to resist, but you should. Likewise (if you can), the astonishing chocolate and coconut pies with their four-inch-high meringues. Order instead a modest slice of pale, unremarkable-looking buttermilk pie. Then try not to make embarrassing sex sounds as you devour it.

There’s only one down side to visiting Buffalo’s Log Cabin. They won’t let you sleep there. And by the time you’re done with the pie, you’ll want to.

— Chris Davis

The Log Cabin, 15530 Highway 13 South (931-296-5311)

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Seasonal Memory

The dog days of August are upon us. And in Memphis, that means that after an hour in the sun your car feels like the inside of an Easy-Bake Oven; your nice leather seats burn the back of your thighs; the steering wheel scalds your hands. Ouch!

Wouldn’t it be a great time to take a vacation in cooler climes? And wouldn’t it be nice if you could take off the entire month and go to the beach or to your ranch? Sure it would. And that’s just what the Iraqi Parliament, the U.S. Congress, and the president of the United States are about to do: take a month off to relax.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, our soldiers continue to carry out the president’s desperate “surge,” battling 120-degree heat and bullets and bombs. They continue to fight and bleed and die, while those who sent them there are fishing and golfing and boating. They continue to battle for Iraqi “democracy,” while the democratically elected Iraqi government takes a break from doing what it’s been doing for years: nothing. They continue to battle tooth and claw for some undefinable “victory,” while the president plays cowboy and “clears brush” on his ranch.

There should be no vacation in wartime, at least no vacation that lasts a month. As we are regularly informed by the administration, we are in a “global war on terror.”

In August 2001, the president went on his annual 30-day vacation. While at his ranch, he was given a document that read “Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” While Bush continued his vacation, bin Laden continued working to create the attacks of 9/11. How soon we forget the lessons of history.

Better Next Time

As the guest speaker of the Memphis Rotary Club on Tuesday, Arkansas governor Mike Beebe focused his speech on the need for bordering governmental jurisdictions to shed their competitiveness and practice the virtues of cooperation.

The governor’s remarks were so softly, even blandly said that a visitor might never have guessed they had any particular relevance to a local situation. That they did, however, would become clear during the Q&A session that followed Beebe’s speech.

A Rotarian asked about Toyota’s recent decision to not to locate its new production plant in nearby Marion, Arkansas, or in Chattanooga, but in Tupelo, Mississippi — just distant enough from Beebe’s bailiwick and the Memphis work force not to benefit either very much.

The questioner wanted to know how much support advocates of a Marion location had received from Memphis and Shelby County officials. Beebe allowed as how there hadn’t been much but declined to blame anybody — neither Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, who was on the dais with him, nor the absent Memphis mayor Willie Herenton, both of whom more or less sat on their hands in deference, as the Arkansas governor gently acknowledged, to “Nashville,” where Governor Phil Bredesen was turning the screws on Chattanooga’s behalf.

The result? A standoff which allowed Tupelo to come in with what Beebe termed an “11th-hour” offer.

There may be a next time, and maybe there’ll be more local governmental support for our neighbor state then — especially since Governor Beebe made it clear that he is ratcheting up Arkansas’ contributions to the maintenance of The Med.

Categories
News

Near Miss

CREDIT: Courtesy of Sandestin Golf and Beach Resort

The thing about golf is, you never really know how you’re going to play until you go out there and play. So it came as quite a letdown when my first shot at Sandestin’s Baytowne Golf Club went straight down the middle of the fairway. “Great,” I thought. “Watch me shoot a great score, and then I’ll have to come back.”

Not just come back to golf, you understand — on that I am hopelessly hooked, pun intended — but come back to the resort life. Maybe it’s aging, or maybe my demagogic travel mind is finally opening up a little, but a guy could get addicted to renting a house between the bay and the beach, playing some golf in the morning, and choosing between a few nice restaurants for dinner.

Consider: I woke up that morning in a room with a view of Choctawatchee Bay, walked over for a big breakfast in Baytowne Village, then called for a free shuttle to the course, where I was set up with a cart, clubs, and a four-color guide to the course. Even the course designer knew how to get a duffer like me. I scanned the scorecard and saw that the first hole was a straight-ahead par 4 with no water, 381 yards from the gold tees … but only 281 from the white! My companions — two salesmen from Birmingham and a local — and I looked at each other, shrugged, and said, “Let’s play the whites!” A golf course is no place for pride.

The other thing about golf is, it suffers from a double-barreled bad reputation: one, that it’s a refuge for guys who want to get away from women, and two, that it’s a refuge for rich, white assholes. (Certainly, the latter would have been my view, had I been visiting Florida in my usual Greyhound/campground mode.)

As for the first, well sure, sometimes the guys want to be with the guys. And sometimes the ladies want to be with the ladies. And sometimes everybody wants the kids to be with the kids. So let’s just put gender aside and say you’re a golfer, traveling with other golfers. And let’s say you’ve decided to stay at Sandestin. And let’s say you want to get in 18 holes while the rest of the crew does something else.

Just as a quick sampler, here are some options, golf first: On the 2,400-acre Sandestin property, you’ve got four courses to choose from: Raven, designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., has mango-scented towels and people who clean your clubs for you; his brother Rees Jones’ Burnt Pine rolls along the coastline for 7,000 yards; Baytowne, which winds through the resort and features kids’ tees; and The Links, which has views of the bay and marina.

So my Guy Mind was whirling on that first fairway. But what if I were married and had kids? What to do with the non-golfers? Obviously, there’s the beach, but there’s also more shops than flagsticks around (including the world’s largest factory outlet mall) and the inevitable salon/spa in the resort. The wife can send the kids out for a sailing lesson, tennis camp, or a ride on a pirate ship, or she could just drop them off in the KidZone to do games, arts, and crafts.

And then there’s the money. They’ve got “stay and play” packages that include lodging, greens fees, cart, and practice balls. Prices vary by season. Four people can spend two nights in a house and play two rounds at Baytowne for $230 in winter up to $356 in summer. Two people can share a hotel room and play The Links twice for the same amount of money. You can spend more than that, but getting together a few friends for a couple nights and a couple rounds and spending a few hundred bucks each is downright reasonable, even to a guy who used to have as his life motto: “Don’t pay rent — pay bus fare!”

That’s why I was in so much trouble on the first hole at Baytowne. I mean, there’s the comfort. And the convenience. And the variety. But now this: a reachable par 4? It got worse when I hit my approach onto the green. Walking up there for my 10-foot birdie putt, I had visions of grandeur: the rental house on a lake, walking to the beach in the mornings, a different course every day, the fishing, the sun, the surf …

It’s a good thing I missed that putt.

portlandpaul@mac.com

Categories
News

South Walton vs. The Machine

Everywhere one goes in the Beaches of South Walton, people say “10 years ago … “: This was a lonesome beach 10 years ago. None of these strip malls were here 10 years ago. Heck, 10 years ago, this was a two-lane road through a forest. You could get a house around here for nothing 10 years ago.

Traveling east on US 98, my host and I headed for Scenic Highway 30A, a 20-mile strip along the Gulf Coast that is the heart of the place I’d been brought in to see.

“Up until about 10 years ago,” my host says, “hardly anybody knew this road was here.”

No more. By the end of my tour, when I had seen all 13 “eclectic beach communities” collectively known as the Beaches of South Walton, it was astoundingly clear what happened here about 10 years ago: The Machine found the place.

You know the Machine. It finds places and fills them up. It develops sleepy little nooks into communities of resorts, condos, fancy restaurants, and golf courses. It forms marketing plans to fill $200 hotel rooms and sell $35 steaks. It raises property values and brings in hordes of service-industry employees who live on the fringes and work three jobs driving shuttles and making lattes and folding sheets. It serves cocktails on the beach. It surrounds fishing towns with skyscrapers.

The Machine has come for South Walton, and it can’t be stopped. But the folks who live here have a plan. It’s apparent that they looked around at their neighbors and said, “Not here — not all of it, anyway.” They set aside forested strips of land as state parks, even reserving some beaches for walk-in-only access. All the other beaches are entirely accessible to the public, and boardwalks connect 30A to the white sands at numerous places. They limited buildings to four floors. They make serious, successful efforts to keep the beaches clean. Even the name, “Beaches of South Walton” (which, of course, is less than 10 years old), reflects a collective search for an identity — and/or a slick marketing campaign. Even as construction explodes in every direction, the PR materials constantly refer to “the pure and simple Beaches of South Walton.”

Such is the pitch: great beaches and every luxury you could want but not completely over the top. We still have some real nature! And we barely got touched by the hurricanes!

And yet the Machine churns. As America gets older and the rich get richer, the Machine gets hungrier. And it doesn’t build for the working class. Scenic Highway 30A is now the scene of such things as Blue Mountain Beach, which “offers spectacular views of the coastline, making it a hot spot for lavish homes and condominiums.” Offerings include Redfish Village, the Village of Blue Mountain Beach, and the Retreat.

WaterColor and WaterSound Beach, owned by a logging company, are both “Southern [themed] coastal resorts.” Seaside is “designing buildings to fill empty parcels” while planning a “splendid plaza” and a tower “in the center of town.” Alys Beach bills itself as “a traditional neighborhood development” with “environmentally friendly courtyard homes with whitewashed masonry and rooftop terraces.” Seacrest Beach touts “marshlands perfect for wading birds” and extensive plantings of live oaks — on a golf course. Rosemary Beach, all of 11 years old, went for the Dutch/West Indies theme: “Bermuda shutters, wide second-floor porches, and arched garage doors.”

It’s a heaping helping of Vegas in the Florida Panhandle, with “beach solitude” replacing “win big” as the central pitch. In both places, the Machine churns out high-end shopping and dining, seven-figure homes and condos, designer golf courses, and brand-new “towns” filled with the food and music of other places.

Consider: A couple years ago, Sandestin, the biggest and oldest resort around, built its own “village” of shops that includes an Acme Oyster House straight from New Orleans and an artificial pond with an “Italian” gondolier. Through this village, every year, winds a golf-cart Mardi Gras parade.

Or this: Seaside proudly proclaims that it was the main location for The Truman Show — a movie about a man who unknowingly lived in a false world.

There’s more of this coming: a big, new airport — the Machine demands multiple nonstops daily — and developments popping up everywhere you look.

The question remains: Can you market a place to death? In South Walton, the counted-on answer is to make peace with the Machine and try to limit it: in other words, be a shopping/dining/beach/condo/gallery/golf destination that manages to retain more than its share of quiet, natural moments.

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for that quiet little fishing village with the mom-and-pop restaurant out on the dock, it’s too late for South Walton. The Machine already got it.