If your Pace weekend still starts and ends on Highway 90, you are working from an old map. The corridor keeps getting more crowded, but the good hours have quietly moved off of it. Between a splash pad that closes one day a week, a bayfront park that just reopened with its shoreline rebuilt, and a rail-trail 15 minutes east, the summer routine here has more edges than it did two years ago.
This is a guide for people who already live in Pace and want the actual cadence, not the tourist listicle. The premise is simple: the highway is where errands happen, and everything worth planning a Saturday around is somewhere else.
The thesis, stated plainly
Pace's summer center of gravity has shifted off Highway 90. The retail corridor is finally catching up to the population that moved here over the last five years, and that is a real quality-of-life change on a Wednesday. It is also why the weekend needs to be planned around water and shade instead of parking lots. The rest of this post is the map.
The summer clock, in the order you use it
Before anything else, memorize these hours. They are the scaffolding of a hot-weather Saturday in Pace.
- Benny Russell Park splash pad, 5417 W. Spencer Field Rd.: open May 1 through September 30, Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed every Monday for maintenance. The park itself runs 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. year-round.
- Floridatown Park, 3900 Floridatown Rd.: 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., with the boat ramp open 24 hours for fishermen.
- Blackwater Heritage State Trail, Milton trailhead at 5533 Alabama St.: sunrise access, visitor center concession most weekends.
The splash pad's Monday closure is the single most useful piece of information in this post. Half the frustrated posts on local Facebook groups every summer are parents driving out on a Monday morning and finding the water off. Plan around it.
Floridatown Park is a different park now
Floridatown had been slowly falling into the bay for two decades. Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and Hurricane Sally in 2020 both took bites out of it, and by the late 2010s the shoreline had retreated hundreds of feet from where a 200-year-old Spanish land grant map showed it sitting.
That changed this June. On June 17, 2026, Santa Rosa County held a ribbon-cutting for the Floridatown Park Living Shoreline Project, the first project of its kind in the county. District 1 Commissioner Bobby Burkett led the unveiling of a seven-year effort designed to slow erosion, improve water quality, and rebuild wildlife habitat along Escambia Bay.
The site is not incidentally chosen. Floridatown sits on an oyster-shell midden, and Chief Dan Helms of the Santa Rosa Band of the Lower Muscogee opened the ceremony with a prayer in Muscogee.
"This is the culmination of many trails that were used for various reasons. A very important one was trading."
In the 1800s, a ferry ran from this spot across the bay to Ferry Pass, and Panton, Leslie & Company moved deerskins through it by the hundreds of thousands. The five and a half acres you are walking your kid across on a Saturday have been a working landing longer than Florida has been a state.
Practically, what the reopening means for a Pace resident: the playground and pavilions are usable again without stepping over erosion cuts, the pier is intact, and the boat ramp is the closest public launch to most of central Pace. Bring your own shade. There is no concession stand and no lifeguard, and the parking lot fills fast on weekends with about a dozen trailer spaces.
Blackwater Heritage Trail is a Pace amenity, not a Milton one
Locals sometimes treat this trail like it belongs to Milton because the trailhead is over there. On a summer morning, that is a distinction without a difference. It is a fifteen-minute drive from most of Pace to the visitor center off Alabama Street, and the payoff is 8.1 paved miles of tree-shaded rail-trail extending north to meet the Navy's 1.5-mile Military Heritage Trail at the East Gate of NAS Whiting Field, per Florida State Parks.
The trail is flat, twelve feet wide, and canopied for most of its length. Benches and restrooms sit at regular intervals. If you have military-family friends stationed at Whiting, the Military Heritage extension puts you at their gate under your own power, which is a nice out-of-town-guest move that costs nothing.
Ride it before 9 a.m. between June and September. After that, the shade stops mattering.
The Highway 90 corridor, sorted
The retail sprawl east of the Publix at Santa Rosa Commons has changed enough in the last twelve months that a lot of Pace residents are still driving to old locations for things that are now closer to home. Here is where the pipeline actually stands, based on Santa Rosa County site-plan filings and construction status reported by the Santa Rosa Press Gazette.
| Project | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Publix at Merganser Commons | 5854 Dogwood Dr. | Open, 7 a.m.–10 p.m. daily |
| Publix Liquors at Merganser Commons | Adjacent | Open |
| McDonald's & Starbucks | Dogwood Dr., near new Publix | Buildings under construction |
| Jim 'N Nick's BBQ | 4625 Hwy 90 beside Davenport Ln. | Site plan approved May 31, no opening timeline |
| HTeaO | 5055 U.S. Hwy 90 | Plans submitted, no timeline |
| Buffalo Wild Wings | Hwy 90 at Watkins St. | Plans submitted November 2023, limited movement since |
| QuikTrip | Avalon Blvd. & San Jose St. | Plans submitted |
| Happy Place Pub & Play | 5661 Quintette Rd. | Planned |
Two takeaways. First, the Dogwood Drive Publix has meaningfully shortened the grocery run for anyone living north of 90 between Chumuckla Highway and Avalon. Second, most of the "coming soon" restaurants have not moved past paper, and if you are budgeting a Buffalo Wild Wings opening into your evening plans this year, do not. The two things worth watching in the next twelve months are the McDonald's and Starbucks on Dogwood, both actively under construction, and Jim 'N Nick's, which just cleared site-plan approval.
Where locals actually eat, when they eat in Pace
Chain fatigue is real here. The Yelp cluster of independently owned Pace restaurants that residents actually mention by name in June 2026 is short and worth committing to memory:
- The Fishing Hole for fried Gulf fish and onion rings.
- Fire and Food and Blackwater Bistro for sit-down dinner without driving to Pensacola.
- Bar515 Cocktails & Tapas for anything resembling a date night on this side of the Escambia Bay Bridge.
- Calle Cuba for a Cuban lunch that has become a genuine word-of-mouth pull.
- Hooked and Flavored and Philly's Cheesesteaks & Hoagies for takeout that is better than it needs to be.
- Tokyo Express and Rock n Roll Sushi for the weekly sushi run.
These are not hidden secrets. They are the places that come up when someone new to Pace asks the neighborhood group where to eat, and the list has been remarkably stable through 2026 even as chains have plugged into the corridor.
A sample Saturday, June through August
If you want the whole thing sequenced, this is the shape of a Pace weekend day that respects the heat and skips the traffic.
- 7:00 a.m. Coffee at home. Drive to the Milton trailhead of the Blackwater Heritage Trail. Ride to the visitor center and back, or push to Whiting Junction if you have the legs.
- 10:00 a.m. Splash pad at Benny Russell opens. Kids stay until they are ready to eat. Adults use one of the shaded pavilions on the east side.
- 12:30 p.m. Lunch at Calle Cuba or The Fishing Hole. Neither is on the way home from the highway, and both are worth the small detour.
- 2:00 p.m. Nap window, or the Publix at Merganser Commons for the week's groceries, whichever the household needs.
- 5:30 p.m. Floridatown Park for the shoreline walk. The new plantings are best in low sun, and Escambia Bay picks up an evening breeze that the interior of Pace does not get.
- 7:00 p.m. Dinner at Blackwater Bistro or Fire and Food, or a takeout Stromboli eaten on the porch.
You will notice this sequence never asks you to sit in the Highway 90 turn lane at Berryhill Road at 4 p.m. That is the point.
Why any of this matters if you are thinking about the market
Where a neighborhood's weekend life happens is a leading indicator of where value accrues in it. The Dogwood Drive corridor did not have a Publix five years ago. The Floridatown shoreline had not been restored eighteen months ago. The Blackwater Trail is one Navy expansion decision away from being the most valuable non-coastal amenity in Santa Rosa County. Pace has not been re-priced for any of that.
If you are a current owner curious what those changes have done to what your home is actually worth right now, Jason & Charlcie Smallwood can pull a real number for your specific street, not a Zestimate that treats Pace as one homogeneous ZIP code. Get Your Free Home Valuation and we will send it back with a note on the block-level comps behind it.
