We hit this part of Florida during a cold snap last February, so despite the brilliant sun, the temperatures reached only the high 50s, and lows were around 40. The severe cold was the first thing the locals mentioned, followed quickly by apologies.

Of course, if your home is in the far North (we live in Montana), there's a word for weather like this—spring! We needed no apologies. We were too busy enjoying ourselves.

We had not set out to make this our destination. We had been visiting relatives near Pensacola and decided to drive U.S. 98 along the Gulf Coast. We arrived in Apalachicola, in the belly of Florida's Panhandle, in late afternoon, and found ourselves transported back a century.

Beautiful old Florida hotels, with broad porches for relaxing in the days before air conditioning, line the city streets. A park established in 1832 beckoned, its grounds filled with live oaks, their branches draped with Spanish moss.

We wandered the park, admiring its gazebo and grounds, then explored nearby neighborhoods and their gracious Victorian homes. Nearby was the Chestnut Street Cemetery, which dates to 1831. It is slowly decaying, but still legible are the headstones of Confederate soldiers and sailors who defended Apalachicola from a Union blockade in the Civil War, as well as those of townspeople and visitors who died decades before the war began.

The Florida hotels we chose, the century-old Gibson Inn, echoed the Victorian graces of the neighborhood; rocking chairs lined its first floor porch. Only a block from Apalachicola's historic waterfront, it was built in 1907 and underwent a three-year restoration in the early 1980s, earning a listing on the National Register of Historic Places. 

Apalachicola began as a seaport in the early 19th century, shipping cotton from inland plantations to New England and Europe. It quickly became the third largest port on the Gulf Coast.

The Union blockade during the Civil War and the postwar decline of cotton effectively ended that chapter of local history. After the war, the focus shifted to lumber from the area's lush cypress forests, and then to seafood which is available to order in all Florida hotels—particularly the harvest from the area's oyster beds.

Oysters aren't quite as plentiful this year as in the past, due to a drought in the Southeast that has affected the salinity of the water, but in a typical year, state fisheries officials say the county's 7,600 acres of oyster bars produce 10 percent of the nation's oysters.