The New Stop on the Grayton Express Carries a Name Every Local Should Know

If you parked at the Grayton Central lot last summer, you know the drill. Pull in off County Highway 283, find a spot among the 204 in that new multi-level facility, and wait for the tram to loop you down to the sand. It opened after a ribbon cutting on June 30, 2025, cost the county about $5.4 million, and it solved a problem every Grayton Beach regular had lived with for years: nowhere to put the car without circling Defuniak Street twice.

That part of the story is old news by South Walton standards. What's newer, and what most people who don't live here full time haven't caught up on yet, is what finished this June. The second half of that same project, the Grayton Beach Community Center at 44 Hotz Avenue, opened its doors alongside a stretch of beach that finally has an official name: the Bets "Beachmama" Haynes Regional Beach Access.

That name is the part worth sitting with, because it changes what the whole project means.

The Lot Everyone Already Knows

The Grayton Central facility was built to solve traffic, not tell a story. It has dedicated ADA, electric vehicle, low-speed vehicle, and bicycle parking, restrooms, and a direct tie-in to the multi-use path that runs along 30A. County officials framed it as congestion relief, plain and simple, a response to years of cars fighting for the same handful of curb spots between the Red Bar and the beach.

It works. But a parking garage is infrastructure. It doesn't tell you anything about the place it serves.

What Opened This June

The Community Center is different. It sits at 44 Hotz Avenue, just a short tram ride from the parking facility, with an information station, restrooms, an observation deck, and a boardwalk that carries you the rest of the way to the water. County paperwork calls the adjacent beach access the Bets "Beachmama" Haynes Regional Beach Access. Locals just call it the Haynes access, and the tram that runs there now departs the Grayton Beach Park and Ride every ten minutes, daily starting at 6 a.m.

For the first time, Grayton Beach has two dedicated tram routes instead of one: the original loop to the heart of town near the Red Bar, and now a second line straight to the Haynes access. That is not a small operational detail. It means a single parking spot at Grayton Central can now put you on two different stretches of beach without moving your car, which matters more here than in towns where you can just walk from your driveway to the dunes.

Who Bets Haynes Was

The name is not a tribute chosen at random. Betty "Bets" Haynes was born and raised in DeFuniak Springs and married her husband, Gap, in 1954. Her parents gave the couple a small piece of Grayton Beach land, and the family spent every summer there, which is how her daughters' friends started calling her Beachmama.

In 1974, when developers moved earthmoving equipment onto the dunes with plans for a condominium complex, Haynes founded Friends of Grayton Beach, a group that eventually grew to about 140 members, most of them full-time or seasonal Grayton residents. The fight lasted nearly a decade. At one point, according to family accounts of the standoff, supporters lay down in front of an earthmover to physically stop construction. By 1982, the group had pledged $25,000 toward the state's purchase of the land, a fraction of the total cost but enough to signal that residents were serious about keeping the beach public.

"She wanted to save the beach for generations to come."

That's how her son-in-law, Billy Buzzett, described her motivation years later. It is a fitting way to think about what stands at the end of the new boardwalk today.

Naming a tram stop and a beach access after her is the county's way of saying that the public land you're walking onto exists because someone spent a decade making sure it would. It's a rare thing for infrastructure to carry that kind of memory, and it's rarer still in a stretch of Florida coastline where so much of the shoreline has gone the other direction.

Two Lots, Two Errands, One Parking Spot

The tram system now overlaps with something else that already existed: the free shuttle run by Chiringo, the beachside restaurant on Hotz Avenue. Chiringo's shuttle also picks up from the same general area near Grayton Central and runs daily from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., a five-minute ride to the restaurant's door. It's a private amenity, not a county tram, but the practical effect for anyone parking at Grayton Central is the same: you can leave your car in one spot for the whole day and use two different free shuttle systems to get to the beach, then to dinner, without repositioning it once.

That table looks like a scheduling footnote until you actually try to plan an evening around it. Park once, ride the Grayton Express to the new access for a sunset walk, then catch the Chiringo shuttle back toward Hotz Avenue for dinner. Two rides, zero car moves.

What This Actually Changes About a Grayton Week

None of this rewrites the rhythm of the town so much as it removes the friction that used to interrupt it. The rest of a Grayton Beach week still runs on the same fixtures it always has.

Tuesday nights at Chiringo now mean Bingo at Ringo, with the restaurant giving away shots, merchandise, and gift cards to keep the start of the week from feeling like a start of the week. On the first and third Friday of every month, the paddle group Gulf Therapy meets at the Western Lake boat launch at 7 a.m. for an open-skill-level paddle out, no board required since rentals are available through the group's site. Warmer months bring volleyball nets to the beach, courtesy of Grayton Volleyball, with pickup games open to anyone willing to jump in. Mornings still belong to Black Bear Bread Co., the bakery and coffee shop from chef Phil McDonald and restaurateur Dave Rauschkolb, and to Hotz Coffee, the walk-up spot serving the full YOLO Coffee line alongside gluten-free muffins and breakfast burritos, open Tuesday through Sunday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. And nights, as they have for years, still belong to the Red Bar on Hotz Avenue, where jazz and bluegrass bands keep people dancing most evenings of the week.

What's different is how easily you can move between all of it now. A single parking decision at Grayton Central used to mean picking one destination for the day. With two tram routes and a private shuttle overlapping from the same general lot, that decision has gotten a lot less final.

A Beach Town That Finally Matches Its Own Story

Grayton Beach has carried the unofficial slogan Nice Dogs, Strange People for longer than anyone can date precisely, a nod to a town that has always prized its own eccentric, resident-first character over polish. For most of that history, the infrastructure around here lagged behind the sentiment. You loved the place, you just had to fight for parking to prove it.

This summer's addition closes that gap in a way that also happens to be honest about how the beach got here at all. The dunes at the end of that new boardwalk are public today because a group of residents, led by a woman named Bets Haynes, refused to let them become someone's private development in the 1970s. Giving her name to the access point isn't sentimental decoration. It's an accurate label for what you're standing on.

If you're already living in Grayton Beach or thinking about how a coastal community holds onto its character while it grows, the Bellville Team spends its days paying attention to exactly this kind of change along 30A. Reach out through our Santa Rosa Beach neighborhood page whenever you're ready to start your coastal journey, or just want to talk through what's changing in the town you already call home.