The Bay Bridge Fest is set to roll in Bay St Louis, May 20-22.

Th event will kick off Friday night with music benefiting the Habitat for Humanity. Saturday will start off with the 5K bridge Run/Walk and festivities to start shortly after. The Bay Bridge Fest has grown steadily over the past couple of years and looks for a great turnout this year. There are still some spots open for vendors and artists with savings on vendor space if you sign up before May 1st.

More information can be viewed at http://www.baybridgefest.org/

Splash Pad at Jones Park, Gulfport

As Spring is setting in nicely with warm weather and little rain (not always a good thing), we can only guess that this will be another hot Mississippi Summer. The good news is that those taking advantage of Jones Park will have another way to stay cool.

The park has finished the Splash Pad and boat-inspired playground equipment which will go well with the harbor once completed (estimated by Summer):

“What is a city along with water without a harbor? Where people can dock their boats and where tourists can come and recreate,” said Gulfport Mayor George Schloegel.

Boat Inspired Playground

“It’s more in keeping with the new design of the harbor. It’s much higher above sea level, so it won’t be destructed in a normal storm. Can’t say it’ll be hurricane proof, but we hope it’ll be a little more sturdy, ” the mayor said. “As soon as we get a few more amenities done in the park and we get most of the construction out of the way, we hope to have boats in the harbor sometime, perhaps this summer.”

With the original harbor and Jones Park taking a serious beating during Katrina, much of the new services will be built to (hopefully) withstand average storms. Hopefully we will not have to find out anytime soon.

It is a really nice sight and the grand picture looks even better. Jones Park is near the intersection of Hwy 49 and Hwy 90 in Gulfport.

Welcome to MSCoast.net.

This site has seen its ups and downs over the years but has basically been sitting stagnant for the past 8 months or so, waiting for a complete direction overhaul. When I first set this site up, I wanted it to be a true community portal but it turned out to be little more than rehashed news.

While I was able to break a few stories before the big guys (WLOX and Sunherald), they were few and far between and of little real value to the community as a whole. Hopefully, with these changes, that will change.

MSCoast.net will not function solely as a news outlet. While I will maintain some news on the site, this will be a very small portion of the site as a whole. I want this site to be a place of interaction, fun, and of use. Starting out, I will focus on the basics such as entertainment and tourism, but eventually I hope to grow into a functional community portal with free classified ads, useful community news, entertainment, restaurant reviews, and more.

Stay tuned – and please, if you think of something that would be useful, send a feature request!