blissful design studio

search the blog

categories

studio blog

projects

staging

design tips

travel

personal

the blissful blog

Travel

posts filed in:

Travel Guide: Rosemary Beach, FL

Latest  in category

I LOVE Rosemary Beach!

As you may already know, for the last few years I have done a girls’ trip with my sister and 2 best friends. So far we have been to Newport Beach, CA, Santa Barbara, CA and Charleston, SC. You can check out a couple of those travel guides here and here. When we plan where to go on these trips, it usually has to have good food, be really cute and be near water. All of us would stare at the ocean all day, so that seems to be a common theme for where we choose to go. I was the only one who had been to Rosemary Beach before. I am normally there once a year to attend Amber Housley’s Coterie Mastermind Retreat. So this was my 6th trip to that area. So I’m going to share what we did on this trip and throw in a few tried and true spots that I know and love from past trips as well. 🙂

where we stayed

the most beautiful home ever

af91ffda-82eb-4133-890c-196ca7822ba1

When I go to Rosemary Beach for my business retreat, I like to stay a night at The Pearl hotel. It’s right in center of Rosemary Beach and it’s so lovely. But when we stay as a group, we love a house to spread out, cook if we want to, lounge around and watch a movie together and not have to split up into 2 or more rooms. We found this home kind of last minute after cancelling our previous booking (long story!) and we could not have loved it more! It was gorgeous and had the PERFECT location!

The house was way bigger than we needed and now we are going to be so spoiled going forward. It had 7 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms, so we each got our own king bedroom with en suite bathroom. We used the beautiful kitchen to cook 2 nights while we were there. The pool was heated and we used that a couple of times. But the living room got so much use for morning chats over tea and coffee and movies at night. There were also bikes that came with the house, so we were able to use those to ride between Alys Beach and Rosemary Beach. 

It was also in a gated community, so we felt super secure. We also had private beach access with a code only for our community and we could access that beach with a few minutes of walking. It was so convenient and I would 1000% stay here again!

394ef93f-989f-46a7-b0aa-0c71457ec324 75ccbc09-ee3d-4bfc-ba2a-98efc37f8b73 6b4a4746-b5d1-40ca-8ea8-60d0af01e721 1718d9d3-6087-46c7-86f6-3adfbefd5370

Where we ate & Drank

I have a few tried and true favorites when I visit Rosemary Beach, but my favorite places to go happen to be in Alys Beach, which is the next little beach town over. Rosemary Beach feels like Europe meets Charleston and Alys Beach feels like you could be in Greece with its all white buildings. And then there is Seaside, which is bright and colorful. And there are great places to go there as well.

So, I’m going to break it up town by town and give you my favorites.

alys beach

IMG_9678

The Citizen is one of my favorite places to eat in Alys Beach. It is delicious and also the restaurant is beautifully designed. We went for dinner and we also ended up there for Oyster Happy Hour as well. I highly recommend that you go!

I also always make it a point to go to Neat, which a cocktail bar and bottle shop. They change their menu each month, so I have never had the same drink there twice. They also serve yummy bar snacks as well. I always try at least 2 drinks and then grab a bottle of something to bring with me to the retreat. But on our girls’ trip we stopped by in the afternoon for a drink on our way back from a bike ride before we went to the beach and it was great as always!

For breakfast, I love Fonville Press. Their fried chicken biscuit is SO good and so is the breakfast flat bread. They also have a full bar and a cute little market attached as well.

Other places to check out – Raw + Juicy and George’s.

IMG_9696 IMG_9776

rosemary beach

IMG_9569

On our first night, we went and grabbed a drink at Havana Beach Bar at The Pearl hotel. I’ve had breakfast there before, but I would love to go back and try it for dinner. The bar was great though!

For dinner we went to La Crema | Tapas & Chocolate. It is really good! The patatas bravas and the brussels sprouts are delicious as are the crab cakes!

IMG_3263

seaside

We didn’t eat in Seaside on our girls’ trip, but I have some favorites that I need to share. First off, food trucks! There are plenty to choose from, but I highly recommend The Meltdown on 30A! I can never choose just one grilled cheese, so go with friends and split a few! I also really like The Great Southern Cafe and I like to grab a margarita and chips and queso at The Taco Bar.

What we did

This was probably our most low key trip that we have taken together. It was super restful and we took it really easy. But there was still plenty to do and we it was all a lot of fun!

biking

As I mentioned, bikes were included in our house rental and we rode them quite bit. One day, we had big plans to ride them like 8 miles one way and 8 miles back, but thank goodness we came across The Hub and decided eating and shopping would be more fun than biking for 3 more hours. Lol! But they were great for getting from house over to Alys Beach and over to Rosemary Beach as well.

IMG_9688 IMG_9694 IMG_9690

spa at the pearl

jwi-12_wide

Relaxation was the name of the game for us on this trip, we booked spa treatments at The Pearl Spa. They only have 2 treatments rooms, so it does make it a little more difficult to schedule with a group of 4 since only 2 can go at a time. And I wanted a body treatment, but the other 3 wanted facials, but we couldn’t do all 3 of them as facials if we wanted to have our treatments at the same time. If you have a treatment at the spa you can use the pool there and order food and drinks, so 2 of us did that while the other 2 got their treatments and vice versa. It worked out, but it probably wasn’t how we would have chosen to do it. Although I will say the Tropical Bliss treatment was amazing – a body scrub followed by a massage. I would totally recommend it!

shopping

IMG_3308

Shops abound in 30A. There is no shortage at all of cute little boutiques to walk around in. Alys Beach has some of my favorite – like Summerstory and Parasol! You can even grab a mimosa next door at Holiday Cafe and walk around with it while you shop.

In Rosemary Beach, I love Pish Posh Patchouli’s, The Hidden Lantern Bookstore, Willow & OKO.

In seaside, my favorite places are Cabana Seaside Style and The Art of Simple. Plus, I love popping into The Seaside Style as well. They also have some fun outside vendors as well and we ended getting matching permanent bracelets together. Nothing like some adult friendship bracelets! Haha!

IMG_9612 IMG_3318 IMG_9598 IMG_9591 IMG_9814 IMG_9823 IMG_9632

beach sunsets & charcuturie

IMG_9672

I think our favorite moments were spent on the beach. 30A has some of the most beautiful white and powdery sand and even in November the water felt warm enough to go into it.

We took drinks, charcuterie and our books with us and we laid on our beach towels reading, chatting and watching the sunset. It was magical. Our charcuterie boxes were made by Graze 30A and delivered to our house. They were the perfect thing to bring down to snack on while we sipped on Two Chicks that we grabbed in Rosemary Beach at Cork & Barrel.

IMG_9885 IMG_9755 IMG_9711 IMG_9722 IMG_9740

And that wraps up this Rosemary Beach travel guide. I hope that if you visit you have as much fun as we did if you visit 30A. Comment below if you try anything on this list and what you thought!

shop my trip looks

JavaScript is currently disabled in this browser. Reactivate it to view this content.

read post

Travel Guide: Rosemary Beach, FL

I LOVE Rosemary Beach! As you may already know, for the last few years I have done a girls’ trip with my sister and 2 best friends. So far we have been to Newport Beach, CA, Santa Barbara, CA and Charleston, SC. You can check out a couple of those travel guides here and here. […]

Travel Guide: Charleston, SC

Charleston is so dreamy! Last weekend I did a girls’ trip to Charleston, SC with my sister and 2 best friends. You may have seen some of it if you follow along with me on Instagram. This is our third annual girls’ trip . Last year we went to Santa Barbara, CA. You can see […]

The Blissful Experience Recap | May 2021 Pt 2

The Blissful Experience Since we have officially opened up registration for our May 2022 retreat, I felt that it was about time to finish Part 2 of this blog series recapping our May 2021. I may be just slightly behind… If you don’t know what The Blissful Experience is then I would love to tell […]

Travel Guide: Santa Barbara

Take me back to Santa Barbara!! If anyone followed along with my many, many stories over the weekend know that I was on a girls’ trip to Santa Barbara. I went with my sister, Stephany, and my friends, Laura & Sarah. The four of us have been close for many, many years now and have […]

The Blissful Experience Recap | May 2021 Pt 1

The Blissful Experience We wrapped up The Blissful Experience just a couple of weeks ago and today I got photos back from my amazing friend and photographer, Keira. And now that I have them, I cannot even wait to share more about the retreat with you!! First, what is The Blissful Experience? It’s a 4-day […]

Pine Cabin: Making Some Progress

and then we weren’t making any progress. Well, if you remember from this post, we bought our cabin over 8 months ago, so you might be wondering why it’s taken us so long to get it remodeled. I mean, after all, remodeling homes is what we do for a living and we pretty much have […]

Pine Cabin: We Bought a Cabin!

well, we bought a cabin 8 months ago… I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to formally introduce you to our cabin in Pine, AZ. But before I do, let me take through the back story of the last 8 months… Elmon (that’s my husband!) and I had been talking about purchasing a cabin […]