Life's a Coast Video Blog

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This page features videos of our paved pedestrian beachfront walkway, locally referred to as the "broadwalk", and ranked by USA Today in the top 10 "promenades". The main two mile long broadwalk is extended at both ends by low use beach parking roadways which have continuations of the pedestrian lane. The main stretch of the broadwalk encompasses a roughly one mile long "strip" of bars, restaurants, and shops, with about another mile bordering a natural park area, and the remainder consists of residential housing and tourist accommodations. A great place to stroll, bike, jog, skate, dine, drink, dance, or just relax and watch the beautiful people.

The half hour long fourth of July fireworks display here is set off from a barge out on the ocean just off of Hollywood Beach, and of course the broadwalk is the place to take it all in if you don't mind a crowd, a rowdy crowd at that (yes, the background music is jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville" playing at one of the local tiki bars, and that is the spirit of the fourth here, "wasting away again in Margaritiville"). Note that our video camera does not handle the lighting of fireworks well at all, and a lot of what just appears to be bright light on the video was actually vivid color to the naked eye, and of course the sound from the video is nothing like being there in person... What you do not see in this video is that if you are out on the beach, is that there are about another half dozen fireworks displays that you can see up and down the coast, as well as the locals setting off their own personal displays right on the beach -- all in all, the place to be for an evening of Independence Day fireworks...

Saxophone on the Beach (be patient, it's there)

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In response to requests, from this point on we will begin to attempt to present "daily" broadwalk videos, similar to what we do with the daily sunrises and sunsets. Note that the videographer indicates that capturing the "dailys" has been difficult due to an admittedly sustained period of unusually strong winds and at times atypically cloudy conditions, plus a few cold spells and a couple of days of record breaking heat, and one of record breaking rainfall (but we are beginning to wonder if maybe the video guy is getting lazy on us). Update: due to the difficulty and "danger" of capturing the dailys, along with the analytical stats indicating that this page has a low hit rate, we have relented to making this more like a "weekend" feature than a daily one (probably on Sundays when the video guy has to traverse the broadwalk to get to the organic market).

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We now have an archive for broadwalk videos on the "Broadwalk Archives" page.

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May 14th, 2009 - The "Tween Season", between winter and summer tourist seasons, before the "mean season" (heat, rain, storms, humidity), the time less crowded when the "loco locals" come back to the beach...

. . . . April 19th, 2009 - Another rare "daily" take of the Broadwalk, and on the weekend even (the video guy had to go to Josh's Organic Market, only open on Sunday)...

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The view from the Turtle Cafe, an oasis of food and drink well north of the "strip" at North Beach park, is so named due to the fact that sea turtles nest their eggs here (this region is rumored to have the highest concentration of nesting sea turtles on the planet, but we are not sure that is correct, but there are quite a lot of them...). Note that the "cage" in this video to the right is reportedly used to house injured sea turtles, but in all our years here we have never observed an occupant of the cage...

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February 21st, 2009 - Cruising by Mcgowan's (that's the video guy in the window reflection -- a slightly better attempt may be found at bottom of this page...)

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A requested retake of the video guy, somewhat better but still not too great -- he will try again until he gets it right, but insists that it is difficult to get a take without some scantily clad ladies strolling by at the same time (probably because he is following them... ;)