Travel: Postcard from Daytona Beach

By Dennis Lennox, CP Contributor | Sunday, April 10, 2022

Forget about Daytona Beach’s stereotypes of race cars and spring crack.

In the course of my current pay a visit to in the lull involving the two periods of spring split — faculty learners and then every person else — I uncovered a location comprehensive of surprises.

There’s no query that Daytona Beach front enjoys around-common identify recognition, thanks to the famous auto race that occurs each and every February at the enormous track adjacent to the not too long ago renovated airport. The observe is in essence a cathedral for racing fanatics.

At the very same time, the position felt somewhat off-the-crushed path if only mainly because there are a noticeable absence of important chain hotels and huge oceanfront resorts as opposed with far more produced and crowded elements of Florida. Together Atlantic Avenue, the strip that parallels the ocean, pretty a handful of outdated-school motels with tropical or in any other case whimsical names can be discovered. One particular this sort of assets is the art deco-model Streamline Hotel, wherever the predecessor of NASCAR was shaped in 1947.

When most persons say or imagine of Daytona Seashore, they mean the seashore itself and not the town of the very same identify.

Managing for 23 miles alongside the Atlantic coastline, the white-sand seaside actually passes by way of a few individual metropolitan areas and one particular city in Volusia County: Ponce Inlet, Daytona Seaside Shores, Daytona Beach and Ormond Seaside. General public entry consists of marked lanes for motorists keen to fork above $20 for the novelty of driving on a seashore.

Even though it’s effortless to by no means go away the sunshine and sand, the serious attract is found in the metropolis correct.

Most visible is a $25 million redevelopment of the esplanade struggling with the Halifax River opposite Beach front Road, Daytona Beach’s main street in all but identify. The moment concluded it will enhance the quaint downtown, which is a welcome departure from the strip malls and unlimited sprawl observed elsewhere in Florida.

On nearby Orange Avenue is St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. Dating to at minimum 1883, the handsome carpenter Gothic church with its high-quality assortment of stained-glass home windows is purportedly the oldest consistently applied church anywhere in the Sunshine State.

A limited drive absent is the Museum of Arts & Sciences, which features the standalone Cici and Hyatt Brown Museum of Art. As opposed to art museums somewhere else, the selection in this article is solely Florida artwork. Functions vary from early depictions of generations-old St. Augustine to impressionist paintings of landscape. In small, the museum punches well over its fat.

If you go

Also truly worth going to are the Halifax Historical Museum, Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse & Museum and The Casements, the former winter season dwelling of John D. Rockefeller.

I stayed in generally quiet Daytona Beach Shores at the Delta, a Marriott branded hotel and a person of the handful of key chain outposts. Not only do quite a few of the rooms have non-public oceanfront balconies, but the household-helpful lodge options immediate accessibility to the seashore and, notably, no vacation resort charges.

Try to eat at The Cellar, an Italian restaurant in the 1-time household of President Warren Harding Leading of Daytona on the 29th flooring of an oceanfront tower or the relaxed Down the Hatch Seafood Corporation with waterfront sights of the Ponce de Leon Inlet.

Most visitors fly into Daytona Beach’s airport, which has day-to-day service from American Airlines and Delta Air Traces. Orlando, found about an hour absent by automobile, has significantly additional flight possibilities.

Dennis Lennox writes a travel column for The Christian Write-up.