College Life

Millennials Go Colonial – Historic Pensacola Village Walking Tour

Historic Pensacola VillageI grew up in a vacationing family. No lie, one year my family skipped Christmas presents and chipped in for a family vacation fund to visit a destination decided solely by randomly selecting a convenient page in the old atlas. That year we visited Clarkesville, Tennessee, enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, and have conducted Christmas in the same manner ever since.

During my sophomore year at PCC, my family came to visit me and decided to make a family vacation out of it. We did the research, wanting to pack as much into a few days as possible, and found the #3 out of 40 ranked tours in Pensacola: the Historic Pensacola Village walking tour.

Here, we transcended time, transported ourselves to another era, and escaped modern time for a day. Our tour guides were men and women dressed in period clothing who were highly skilled in making history come alive by reliving culture in Pensacola as it used to be hundreds of years ago.

The tours are tailor-made to be as short or as long as you want, so we made it a morning event, but we could have definitely toured longer, especially in the museums. Our tickets covered admission into the Museum of Commerce, the Museum of Industry, and the T.T. Wentworth Museum. Along with culturally-rich museums, we toured outdoor herb gardens, the yellow fever cabin, magnificent Victorian-era homes, and rustic duplex cottages.

Old Christ Church awed us with stories, history, and architectural beauty, and we visited almost twenty properties in the Pensacola National Register Historic District. Our feet crunched over leaves dropped on the Colonial Archaeological Trail. We felt velvety old chairs and smooth banisters built hundreds of years prior to our touch.

By the end of the tour, just meandering down the cobbled streets and pebbly walkways gazing into homes built in the early 1800s seemed natural, so exiting the village tour and climbing back into our Suburban seemed surreal, like teleporting in a time machine. Just seconds before we had been colonials, now we were millennials again.

This Saturday’s forecast is 84 and sunny—perfect for a walking tour, so grab some friends and take a hike through time. When you get back as a smarter, more culturally-enriched college student, you’ll be glad you went. Or maybe you’re reading this planning a Thanksgiving vacation to visit your student enrolled in PCC. Add it to the schedule. Don’t leave it up to random chance and an old atlas page. Trust me. I’ve been a colonial millennial.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed in Life in the Nest are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Pensacola Christian College.
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