PANAMA CITY BEACH — Dick and Sharon Kauffman of Dublin, Ohio, could find no free doughnuts when they arrived Friday morning to the Visitor Information Center in Panama City Beach to attend Winter Resident Appreciation Day.
By the time they arrived shortly before 11 a.m. at the event sponsored by the Panama City Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau, 42 dozen doughnuts had been devoured by more than 800 snowbirds who attended the event. Free coffee and doughnuts were served until they ran out.
Sharon Kauffman said her friends told her it would be a good event to attend to learn of activities this season.
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“Our friend that we are with said there were going to be people here who could point out points of interest, activities,” she said.
Dick Kauffman, like many other snowbirds interviewed this week, said Panama City Beach has many attractive qualities for winter residents. They said there’s numerous free or low-cost activities for seniors to enjoy.
“It’s clean,” he said. “The restaurants are good. People seem to be friendly.”
Barrie Ainslie, the bureau’s director of visitor services, said Winter Resident Appreciation Day is like a homecoming event for the winter visitors.
“It’s like a reunion because they haven’t seen each other in a year,” she said. “It’s a place where they can all gather and talk about being at this home again.”
Ainslie said one new attraction this year for the visitors is a Business Expo planned for next Tuesday’s Winter Resident Homecoming Dance and Social. She said businesses used to have giveaways at the Winter Resident Appreciation Day, but that will occur at that event.
“We’ve added a little bit of an element to our Homecoming Dance,” she said.
Good season expected: Ainslie said the large numbers of visitors who showed up to Friday’s event could signal a good winter season ahead.
In recent weeks, traffic has picked up substantially all over Bay County, with many vehicles having out-of-state tags. Restaurants and attractions that were slow a few weeks ago were doing brisk business this week.
On Thursday afternoon, the parking lot at the Carmike 10 in Panama City was full of cars with out-of-state license plates.
Winter residents also were enjoying activities at The Ark on Panama City Beach on Thursday afternoon. Several classes were being offered, including one where residents were whittling and engraving walking sticks.
Charles Scherer from Wisconsin, who has been coming here during the winter months for 12 years, was taking a golf ball-carving class. He said reasonable costs make Panama City Beach more attractive as a winter haven than places farther south in Florida.
“They usually offer a pretty good deal to come back again,” said Scherer, who stays in the Commodore condominium.
Wayne Young, a retired forester from northern Ontario, brought down the sticks that people were using in the walking cane class, where they were whittling and burning insignias into the sticks.
He, too, said Panama City Beach is more appealing as a winter home than other places.
“It’s beautiful country,” he said. “The beaches are nice, and we had some friends that retired here before us. We join them down here and really enjoyed the city. The farther south you go towards Orlando or Clearwater, the more expensive it is. This is a reasonable price.”
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Bill Elving from central Illinois has been coming to stay in the winter on Panama City Beach for about nine years.
“We’ve been to [Fort] Lauderdale and [Cape] Canaveral and Orlando and Fort Myers,” he said. “But this is laidback.
“There are a whole lot of snowbirds here. You hardly go anywhere here where you don’t run into someone who doesn’t know where you are from or what is going on in your part of the world.”