Fly Into Spring Kite Festival

Let’s recap the weekend! The Kitty Hawk Kites crew traveled to Fort Walton Beach this weekend for our annual Fly Into Spring Kite Festival. We had an amazing weekend of flying and spending time with our invited kite flyers. Kenny Burns of KB Kites and Kurt Lisk of Wind Feathers, Drayton Callison from Worlds Greatest Kiting, Quad FX, and Emerald Coast Flyers all came out and had awesome displays. We had tasty food and enjoyed the beach. Read about it below!

We traveled down to Destin, FL on Thursday last week to kick off our weekend. Friday, we spent the day in our Destin Kitty Hawk Kites store. We got to soak in the BEAUTIFUL view, helped get some product out for the year and interacted with customers as they flew through the store. Destin is one of our busiest and most successful stores. It was a whirlwind! Our Destin, FL location is hiring all positions now, and they have housing. Can you think of a better way to spend your summer?!

After half a day at our Destin store, we headed over to our Fort Walton Beach location to prep for the festival and get some product store ready. This store is right on the beach, so the view was amazing! The Okaloosa Island Boardwalk is home to our store and some delicious restaurants that were kind enough to keep us fed during the festival. Shoutout to AJ’s Beach Club and Rockin’ Tacos for the best meals!

On Saturday, it was go time! We set up our full-service retail tent with kites and toys right on the beach and met with the Kite Flyers to get the party started. We had light wind on Saturday but managed to get some kites in the air and bouncing buddies! Kenny Burns had his Flo Shades set up which wowed everyone! Drayton was able to get his 100ft octopus kite in the air. And Kurt’s wind feathers were popular with the crowds! We set up toys and games for people to demo as they shopped the tent. Our bubble wand was a huge hit! We ended the day with a little more sunshine and wind and were able to get our giant fish in the air. The Emerald Coast Flyers were able to get lots of bouncing buddies on display for people to see.

Sunday rolled in with light wind again and plenty of sunshine in the morning. The wind switched in the early afternoon which allowed us to get our display up. It was amazing to see all those kites flying for the crowd! Quad FX did an amazing job with their stunt kites and interacting with interested bystanders. We can’t thank the kite flying teams and organizations enough for coming out and truly doing an amazing job! This was a Kite Festival to remember, and we can’t wait to do it all again this fall!