That is to say, the first Saturday of vacation.
The previous day, we retrieved the boy from his mom’s house. She packed for him again. While she’s not my favorite person, I cannot tell you all how much of a luxury it is to not have to worry about finding an entire week’s worth of clothes for the boy.
Anyway, this enabled us to leave for the beach extra early on Saturday. As in, we were tooling down the main road of our subdivision by 6:45 AM. (YES, AM). On the brighter side, this eventually meant we hit the beach by noon. Well, the beach house anyway. And this beach house, yea it was phat. OMG, yes. With a PH. Indeeeeeedy. 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, kitchen with stainless steel appliances, big deck that leads (after only a minor Bhataan Death March) to the ocean. We get inside the house and informally assign bedrooms (Gene and I nabbed the bedroom with the canopy bed and the deck w/ hot tub, ha ha ha), and, practically crazed with our good fortune, realize that the rest of our par-tay hasn’t arrived.
(They were coming from Ohio, which is only 12 hours further than Cheesecake City).
We unpacked and figured out the hot tub. Gene and I even got in, although it was coooold because it hadn’t been turned on in nearly a week. After a relaxing soak, we hit a restaurant called the Crab Shack (no relation to Joe’s) for dinner. The boys split the “Sampler Platter for 2”, but I think the menu writer left off the word “Armies” because it was a serious amount of food. I stuck w/ boiled shrimp and stealing some of the boys food when they weren’t looking. The restaurant was smack dab on the water and the most interesting feature was that the restaurant was full of cats. Did you know: Not even seafood crazed cats will eat crawfish.
Then, a return to the house and the hot tub, which was hot and bubbly. Mmmm!