We went for our usual breakfast in the lobby and I played another game of pinochle and once again, my luck doesn’t seem to have changed at all.
We went to another shopping area similar to Barefoot Landing but less over water. It just had a lot of walkways across the water to shops on either side. We ate lunch at Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville. They play the Margaritaville song about every hour and when they do there’s a huge hurricane thing spinning on the ceiling where a giant bottle of something lowers down from the middle of it and empties a bunch of water into a giant blender which whirls it around for a while. I don’t know why, but there you have it. Wandering around, we also got to sample freshly made taffy and play a much better and more creative mini golf course complete with a fire spewing volcano and rivers obstructing parts of the course. Josh, Nathan, and I discovered an awesome store ‘Retroactive’ which features paraphernalia from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. They even had a working PacMan arcade machine which promptly drained about $3 out of us at 25 cents a play. I got a My Chemical Romance shirt from a rock n roll tshirt shop next door, and we scouted out the clubs for the area for Thursday night possibilities.
Archive for the 'Spring Break '07' Category
After breakfast in the lobby we went down to the water, since it was the warmest it’s been so far. Unfortunately the water was as cold as you could expect the Atlantic to be, so we never spend much time in it. We went to a great chinese buffet for lunch and then wandered around a shopping area called Barefoot Landing. Half of it is over a lake and you are walking around on boardwalks. Among the more or less interesting things, we found out that Maggie Moo’s (at least this one) serves Jones Soda floats, which instantly brought Josh, Andy, and myself in for one. One Green Apple, Fufu Berry, and Cream Soda float later we were walking around freezing in the 55 degree wind.
Once it got cold enough, we came back and I got to learn a new card game called pinochle (say “Pea - Knuckle”) which is basically an over complicated combination of bridge and rook with some extra strategy thrown in. My luck from yesterday’s monopoly seemed to be holding out, as I continuously got horrible hands, but none quite horrible enough to fall under the miss-deal bylaw of the game. None the less, Diana and I barely made it back to zero by the time David and John won.
We got up in time for another breakfast in the lobby before heading back up and playing Monopoly for a few hours. It all came down to me and Josh, and even though the odds were completely in my favor, I hit a streak of 7 rolls where I had to pay at least $100 if not $1000 and Josh didn’t bother landing on any of my properties more than once the whole game, so I lost purely by luck. We went back out for a late Mexican lunch and since it was almost 6 we waited for the fresh batch of doughnuts to come up at the Krispy Kreme next door. If you’ve never had them fresh like that, you’ll never understand how different a doughnut can be.
That evening we played mini golf at a Myan themed indoor/outdoor place. I definitely had a terrible time trying to keep up with last place holding a perfect 3 stroke average for the course. When we got back we discovered happy hour at the bar on the second floor of the hotel, so we all got free meatballs and daiquiris (virgin, of course).
We happened upon a weak wireless signal that keeps fading in and out, but at least it has free internet. In other news, we’re heading out to a Chinese buffet now.
We got up just in time for the end of the hotel’s complementary breakfast. It was a fairly good buffet with a full selection of eggs, bacon, sausage, grits, oatmeal, waffles, cereal, yogurt, etc. We drove about 10 minutes to a non-denominational church which was, interesting, to say the least. It was in what appeared to be a converted warehouse. The service itself was pretty much super duper, ultra, mega, ultra contemporary. So much so that it didn’t even seem much like church has been in years. Seemed more like something that I would have gotten back in the 4th grade summer programs. The stage was filled with all sorts of props that he used in his “sermon,” which I’m afraid to say outnumbered his scriptural references. Quite honestly it reminded me very much of a Silver Ring Thing show, rather than a Sunday morning church service. Needless to say neither I nor several others liked it at all and were definitely ready to get back to the hotel.
This afternoon we went to the health center to swim in their indoor pool for a while before we decided to head into Myrtle Beach, proper. (You see, we’re really more like 10 miles north of Myrtle Beach.) We stopped to eat at a very good Mexican restaurant and played a game at a Myan themed, mostly indoor mini golf course. We also spend a little time on the strip of street side stores right along the heart of the beach. I stopped to play DDR with David but, being on standard and not knowing the songs well, he picked a good combination of songs to effectively send me into the next best thing to cardiac arrest on heavy. Even though that was hours ago, I’ve still only barely recovered from the nausea. It’s been far too long since I’ve last played.
Pictures will come tomorrow morning.
