PANAMA CITY BEACH – The parking lot at The Boardwalk Beach Resort is full of cars bearing plates from Iowa, Michigan, even Ontario and Nova Scotia, which can mean only one thing – it must be snowbird season.
The Boardwalk, along with other local venues, will host several events geared toward these winter residents, including weekly “Snowbird Dances” with DJ Jim Lawson like one held on Sunday afternoon.
“Our first dance this year was 221 [people], we’ve had as many as 300, not this year, but last year, so it has grown a lot with people from all over – Canada and all the states,” said Vera Rogers, who has hosted the dances with Lawson for the last 14 years. Rogers said the dances, now held in one of the Boardwalk’s largest ballrooms, were once held in the Rusty Anchor Bar & Grill – a smaller restaurant on the resort’s property, which could hardly hold 100 people.
Marty Robitaille, who hails from a small town “about a hundred miles north of Toronto,” said he comes down every year between Christmas and New Year’s and stays until the end of February.
“We leave before Spring Break,” he said.
Robitaille and his family and friends like to spend their time on the beach searching out live music.
“We tour around and go to the dances a lot. We go to the VFW club on Back Beach. We go to the Beach House, farther out – country music, live bands. Wherever there’s a live band going, we’ll go,”
Another visitor from Canada, Louina Guislen, liked the friendly attitudes she has encountered.
“The people are always so ready to meet people, you know, the snowbirds. And that’s what we like – you can go down the street and somebody will talk to you and say, ‘Where you from?’ It’s a great place to be,” said Guislain., adding that, in her experience, “There’s no end of things to do.”