Todd, myself, and our 20 month old twin boys recently took a trip to the notorious Rosemary Beach in Florida. Rosemary beach is a beautiful, small, boutique beach known for it’s stunning architecture. Rosemary is located on Florida’s 30A along the Gulf, and is sandwiched in along with quite a few other small beaches in between Destin & Panama City Beach. Rosemary Beach is a private beach, so only those who stay in Rosemary Beach are allowed access to the beach, as well as the four pools.
Virginia is home for us, so to get to Rosemary it took about 12 hours. We decided to break up the trip into two days, staying overnight in Chattanooga, TN.
If you are traveling with toddlers, I highly recommend this DVD system that a friend let us borrow. It made our trip wayyyy smoother (and snacks help too!). I was able to control it with a remote, and the screens connect and play at the same times, but they don’t have to share!
We stayed in a carriage house (guest house) of one of the beach houses in Rosemary. If you are looking to stay in the area, make sure you are actually staying in Rosemary, a lot of the listings are tricky! However, you can cut some costs by staying non ocean front, in a guest house, or rather in a nearby beach. You won’t find any chain hotels in Rosemary. It’s mainly just privately owned beach houses and boutique hotels. You can find the carriage house we stayed at here. It was perfect for young kids because it was relatively baby proof, and we could close the doors when they went to sleep!
DAY 1:
We kicked off our first full day in Rosemary with a bike ride to BBB (Big Bad Breakfast), which came highly recommended, was kid friendly, and had an amazing view.
We then hit up one of the Rosemary pools that we had access too! The boys loved it and we pretty much had the pool to ourselves!
P.S. if you are eating out with young kids, these plastic disposable sticky placemats are a life saver! We used them constantly on our trip and bonus, our boys learned the names of a ton of aquatic life!
I highly recommend going to Rosemary in May because the temperature was perfect! Not too hot, but not too cold!
For dinner we decided to check out The Hub. (You will have to drive here!) located in Watersound. It’s the perfect family friendly area with live entertainment (check the schedule) and some restaurants and shops in the area. Our boys quickly made friends with other kids and loved playing corn hole! We didn’t eat a ton, but really enjoyed the food we tried from the Macho Taco!
Palm tree toddler outfits linked here
DAY 2:
The next morning Todd woke up early and biked to Charlie’s donuts to get us some before they sold out, and then we headed to the beach!
One of the awesome things about Rosemary/surrounding areas is there are a lot of big green spaces that kids can run around in! Right in front of The Pearl hotel, there is this big green space that the boys loved running around on. It’s perfect because it’s very close to beach access, as well as local restaurants. So kids can get their wiggles out!
Some of our beach essentials:
–beach wagon (yes, this wagon rolls in the sand!)
–beach bag (rinse it right out with a hose to remove all the sand!)
-Fav baby/toddler sunscreen: option one / option two
-cute one piece swimsuit for toddlers (ours is sold out but this is similar!)
For dinner, we tried out Amica 30A Italian Kitchen. Another family friendly place that had happy hour specials on pizza making our dinner very affordable and delicious!
DAY 3:
The next day we decided to start our morning off with a bike ride to Alys. If you think your family is the bike riding type, make sure to rent bikes! It was one of the highlights of our trip and we often went for morning and night time bike rides!
Alys is another beach, right next door to Rosemary. It was an easy bike ride, even with kids. Alys is known for it’s beautiful white architecture, so it’s fun just to ride around and look at all the beautiful homes!
While we were in Alys, we made a stop at Raw & Juicy for smoothies!
After we biked back, we made our way to the Rosemary Farmer’s Market! This was by far the best Farmer’s market I have ever been to! If you are in the area on a Sunday, then you have to check it out! We got some Ukranian baked goods, homemade cookies, and some spicy jelly, but they literally had everything!
We made another trip to our favorite pool and then headed in for naps!
Afterwards, there was a bit of rain on the forecast, so we decided it would be a good day to try to drive into Destin to go to some of the outlet shops. The outlets were just so-so. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them unless you really need something in doors to do. We also tried to snag dinner in Destin. One of the top rated places was Fudpuckers, which was the opposite vibe of Rosemary, but still fun! They had live alligators that you could feed and get pictures with, a total tourist thing! But after waiting way longer than we thought we would be waiting and then finally sitting down at our table and seeing the prices for literally nothing but fried foods, we decided to leave. We have never done that, but our boys were over it (they had waited so nicely and at this point it was past their bedtime), and we just didn’t feel like sitting through a long meal after waiting for so long with them already, and having it cost us an arm and a leg. So we ended up getting take out from Five Guys! (Even the best vacations have hiccups!)
Day 4:
We started off our last full day with a breakfast at a local fav: Donut Hole. This cute breakfast joint has both sit down breakfast and donuts you can pick up (which we did the last day!). The food was good, very typical breakfast dinner food! If you plan on eating here get there early! The line goes out the door, very quickly, but they do have a cute place for kids (and adults) to play while the wait, complete with corn hole!
brown two piece outfit linked here
Thankfully though our wait was short because we were up bright and early because #toddlers.
Next up we had another fun day at the beach. I think this was our favorite day by far because the boys really started to enjoy the ocean!
And of course, we wore these two boys out, so they had another sleepy wagon ride!
After nap (during nap I got some alone time at the pool!). We spent our last evening over in Seaside.
Seaside is another cute beach town about 20 minutes from Rosemary. You will definitely want to drive there! (and be prepared to pay for parking on your cell phone).
There is a really great area full of cute shops and food trucks. We first made a stop in Duckie’s which is the absolute cutest toy store and picked the boys up some ducks!
We then got some dinner from the food trucks. I went with a delicious gourmet grilled cheese from The Meltdown (seriously they all sounded amazing I want to go back here) called Strawberry Goat Forever, and Todd got some seafood from The Shrimp Shack. We were both very happy with our selections!
We also got some ice cream with a flavor swirl from Dawson’s Yogurt. It was just so, so. I’m more of a chocolate person, and they only do flavor swirls in vanilla.
Day 5:
The next morning we woke up early to start our two day journey home, but made a pit stop back at the Donut Hole for a few donuts before we left town!
We of course made a few pit stops on the way home. We stopped at a fun park, and we also made it to the Unclaimed Baggage store in Alabama (where you can buy peoples unclaimed luggage items) to do a bit of thrifting!
Then we made the rest of our trip home!
Have you ever been to Rosemary Beach? Or any of the beachs on 30A? I would love to hear which one is your favorite!
-Kasey
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