OKOBOJI, Iowa | When the full moon rises above East Lake Okoboji, the place to be is the Barefoot Bar, a slice of Florida with its palm trees and tiki hut bars and restrooms … and Full Moon Parties every summer month, no matter what day of the week it is.

So say Butch and Debbie Parks, owners of the once-kind-of-a-secret bar located behind Parks Marina at Okoboji that is entering its second decade.

“It’s the one thing that has made us famous,” Debbie said of the parties. “We have a most beautiful view of the moon over East Lake right here. It’s just amazing. We do a seafood boil and you can come and eat and they pile the seafood up on your table. Its’ very social and we book an extra special band that night.”

Strangers wandering into the waterfront bar are amazed to see palm trees that are shipped from Florida along with the palm leaves used to cover the Tiki Bar.

When Debbie first went to work at the Marina for future husband Butch, she remembers the watch area behind the business where customers could watch the boats. They scheduled a special event for boat customers there and immediately realized how much fun it could be to just hang out on a beautiful lake front which wasn’t being used for much of anything.

This was followed by a trip to Florida and the Miami Boat Show where the idea of The Barefoot Bar came to fruition.

“We then decided to study every tiki bar from South Beach Miami all the way down to Key West,” she said. “It was tough research, a hard job, but somebody had to do it.”

They took pictures of all the structures and made connections, like finding a guy who sold thatch roofing. So when they got back to Iowa, they gave the information to Butch’s son, Brady, who came up with drawings for the first Tiki Bar, and by 2001, they were ready to build.

“We thought, if we’re going to do this, it needs to be authentic. It needs to be real. So all of those tall leaves ended up being shipped up in a refrigerated truck because when you build the tiki hut, the leaves have to be fresh in order for it to work,” Debbie said.

“So we started out with the original Tiki Bar and we had 10 tables and six palm trees,” Butch said. “The palm trees were imported from south of Miami at Homestead. And that first summer (of 2002), Debbie came up with The Barefoot Bar (the umbrella name for what evolved into three freestanding bars). And the first summer, it was a nice-kept secret. A nice, cool, friendly place.”

But word spread and people kept coming. More all the time.

So many people came between that Memorial Day opening in 2002 and the next weekend that they built a second bar, christened Karla’s Bar for the bar manager, and it remains a popular place.

And the place kept growing. After Karla’s Bar came the Shirt Shack, the Deck Bar and a new kitchen, one that could pass inspection from the restaurant inspector. The last bar to come, last year, was the Marley Bar.

“We get new palm trees every year. We get as many of them into the showroom as we can and keep them alive all year," Debbie said. “All of this stuff gets taken out and put into a building, like the showroom, for storage every year. We have to get everything out, rebuild all of the decks and all of the docks. All the bathrooms come out, even the open-air one. Everything gets brought in and brought out every year by a big forklift. So it’s quite the scene every year.”

The Barefoot Bar opened in March last year because the weather was amenable. This year, however, it was late May before they could risk bringing the palm trees out of warm storage. Debbie said they like to shoot for a May 1 opening, but trees have been taken out too early in past years, trees that can’t survive north Florida, let alone Northwest Iowa.

“We have about 75 palm trees,” Butch said. “We have some over at Okoboji Boats. But we save about 50 every year. We buy 25 to 30 new trees every year. Some of them are just too tall to fit in our buildings anyway.”

A lot of families visit The Barefoot Bar, with water slides and a playground area located just past the official intersection of Sesame Street and Rodeo Drive, just past the gift shop,

“We’ve got more strollers here. Yesterday I swear there were like 30 moms with their strollers here,” Debbie said. “During full moon parties, between 7 and 8, it’s all kids standing in front of the band."

There used to be a sort of official house band, Ace Band, but there are different bands showing up every years now, Butch said.

And the bar closes at 11 p.m., about an hour past dark.

“You can come here and be who you want to be. There are no rules,” Butch said. “You just have to behave."

“We also have some of the greatest food in the world,” prepared by chef “Phamous” Phil Johnson whose passion is barbecue, Debbie said. Everything is fresh off the grill.

“The really cool things is how it brings people into our store and these guys are boaters,” she said. “We sell a lifestyle.”