Standing on the town dock, which pokes out into the Perdido Sound, and facing the town itself, one can see the Perdido Pass Bridge to the right and slightly behind them, roughly a mile away. The coast running of to the right toward the bridge turns into swamp quickly, right past a small tributary. Follow that tributary inland just a few hundred feet and you’ll find yourself standing on the dock of the oyster bar Blue Latitudes, along with the attached seafood market, which buys fish directly from the boats every morning off the dock.Through the bar and out the back door, which is the main entrance, across a gravel and shell parking lot, there’s a stone stairway six steps high that climbs the bank up to Main Street, which slopes up toward the town to the right. Directly in front of you is the ten-acre city park, and through the Spanish moss-draped trees you can just see the Innerarity Key B&B. If you return to the dock and turn right, away from Blue Latitudes, you’ll find a paved drive that follows the curve of the beach to the steps of the B&B.
Walking back across the park, evergreen live oak leaves filtering sunlight and a lush green carpet of grass underfoot, you’ll come back to Main Street and the town’s buildings.
The first building on the south end of the row is a natural foods market called Manna Grocer. Manna still uses an old-style cash register that has a large handle to pull to register a transaction. It dings cheerfully every time someone makes a purchase.
In the next building there’s a bookstore with a coffee shop called Sun Dog. They have a couple of computers with internet access so patrons can sit, read books, drink coffee and surf the web in one tight little store. It has hardwood floors, where the grocery had tile, and where the grocer was all white and light colored inside; the coffee shop is dark and filled with shadows. Its bookshelves stretch from the floor to the twelve-foot-high ceilings, and it has ladders on wheels that follow a rail around the store so customers could peruse the upper shelves.
In the next building there’s a drugstore and general merchandiser. It’s called Perdido Transit Drugs and Mercantile. It has a big RX sign above the door. Inside there are postcards, toys, health and beauty products, all the stuff you would normally get at a drugstore, but the store carries clothes, too, hence the Mercantile portion of the store’s name. They carry mostly working clothes, like Carhartt and Liberty, along with an outdoors selection, hiking boots and the like.
The next building is the radio station and, above it, my apartment. All the buildings have apartments of some type and size above them. The business’s owners lived in most of them.
The next building is the diner called The Along the Way Café. The café has pale pastel yellow walls. The staff wears yellow skirts with white aprons like you might have seen in a diner in the 1950s. The whole café has that look, but don’t be mistaken, it’s not out of some nostalgia bid, they’ve actually been dressing that way since the fifties and have just never stopped or changed.
The building following the café, the last one on the street, is the barber/shoe shine shop. Beyond the barbershop there’s a parking lot, and for ten months out of the year there’s a vegetable and fruit stand in that parking lot.
Past the parking lot is the main access road, on which you can turn right to head back out to 292, or you can turn left and find the rest of Innerarity Point’s residents, their houses and trailers.
