Can you remember, as a child, how exciting it was to take a couple of days off school to do something special? When I was a kid, on random winter Wednesdays from time to time, my Dad would suddenly get a wild hair for a midweek ski trip. And of course, to get some March sun on their cheeks in the process.
As my dad surely recalls from those early morning ski trips, a couple of hours in the backseat of a car is about as much as eight-year-olds can take. First thing you notice, as your penned-up kids burst from the car, is the grounds. Soaring up through both floors is a forty-foot-tall climbing maze for children to scale, and the day we visited the place was fairly buzzing with the happy sounds of creative play. New additions include the adjacent Wings Performing Arts Auditorium, which brings theatrical opportunities to local kids by staging several productions a year; and an impressive kitchen classroom fully outfitted by Mississippi-based Viking Range Corporation, where adult patrons can sign up for cooking classes led by area chefs.
Close as it is to the water, Gulfport does not lack places to feed fried seafood to hungry kids. So after a couple of hours at the museum we went in search of some. Five minutes from Lynn Meadows we found it perched high up on stilts over a scenic stretch of Bayou Bernard. The Blow Fly Inn has been doing its thing for forty years, during which time its seafood, steaks, barbecue ribs and sweeping views have made it a favorite among locals and visitors, who arrive by the car- and boat-load year-round.
Good, old-fashioned Southern seaside fare ranged from perfectly fried shrimp and catfish and a velvety she-crab bisque, to crabcakes with remoulade sauce, whole broiled flounder, lots of pastas and bone-in ribeye steaks.
But cruising eastwards along Beach Boulevard out of Gulfport, there are still many gaps between the homes and businesses along the beachfront. Each vacant, grassy lot shaded by twisted, hardy live oaks serves as a reminder of the twenty-five-foot storm surge that blasted through here. In Biloxi though, the rebuilding has been much more comprehensive, with enough bright pink-and-green beach bars, crab shacks, jet-ski rental stands and shark-mouth-doored souvenir shops to satisfy the most color-starved Midwestern snowbird refugee.
