Ever since I was crawling, my family has taken summer trips to Pensacola, Florida. Now I have a lifetime full of memories from our trips to Pensacola. It seems like every time we return, the beach has changed a little. I remember playing in the mountainous sand dunes as a child. Now the dunes are gone and most of the beach is flat. My last trip to Pensacola was in April 2004. Things have changed quite a bit since that trip. When the eye of Hurricane Ivan passed over Gulf Shores, close to Pensacola, in September 2004, it was like the eye of Zeus looking down. It saddened me looking through pictures of the damage, seeing the aftermath of a place I had spent so much time.

That April we stayed at Five Flags Inn, a hotel on Pensacola Beach. Five Flags Inn was a small, two story hotel right on the beach, with all 50 rooms facing the beach. Being on the beach provides a pleasure to all of my senses. When I walked out of the room, I could feel the warm breeze off of the water, hear the waves on the shore, and see the beautiful blue-green water of the Gulf of Mexico. The floor in all of the rooms were concrete, and the walls were painted concrete blocks. The hotel was two stories with 24 rooms on the bottom floor and 26 rooms on the top floor. It was painted white and the doors were aqua green. Every room had a large window that spanned the width of the room, minus the door. Palms trees lined the patio, which was concrete and had a large swimming pool on the southeast corner. At night I saw people swimming and families using the grills, cooking the fish they had caught during the day. The magnificent Pensacola Pier was within walking distance from the hotel.

In the pre-dawn hours of September 16^th, 2004, Five Flags Inn was drastically changed. Hurricane Ivan ripped the roof completely off of the hotel, exposing the steel frame construction of the hotel. The windows, doors, and frames were ripped from the top floor, exposing the top floor rooms like a doll house. The bottom floor did not fare much better. Almost every door and window was ripped from the bottom floor. In some rooms the pictures are still in place on the wall, and chairs are still sitting upright on the floor. The once-beautiful palm trees had their leaves ripped from them, and some of the trees were even blown down. The patio could no longer be seen because it was covered by many feet of snow-white sand. Palm leaves were scattered about. The right hand side of the pool was filled with dirt while the left hand side was filled with water. A large piece of the patio that once surrounded the pool was lying in the pool. As awful as it looked, the pool received no structural damage. The hotel has been torn down and the site since cleaned returning it to its primitive state. It is unknown at this time if the hotel will be redeveloped on the site as it was.

My family has not returned since that hurricane hit. My mind's eye still sees me and my family chasing crabs down Ft. Pickens Road and tent camping at the Ft. Pickens campground. Things have changed, but the city has mostly rebuilt. Ft. Pickens Road has still not re-opened, but should by June of 2008. Someday I will go back and make new memories.

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