Seven Mile Beach
Friday we slept in again, then headed straight to the ocean. The waves were fairly rough, and kept pushing us toward the south end of the beach. We drifted right past 23/7 several times.
Of course, having stared at it so often, we had to go there for lunch around 2:30. Have I mentioned how cute their little dogs are?
I had a tomato and mozzarella sandwich. I’m usually not a huge fan of tomatoes, but everything tastes different there. Mostly way more fresh. While we were sitting there, we finally got to see the owner of the bar, Jamaican John. He was from upstate New York, so that accent mixed with tinges of Jamaican was fascinating.
A group of guys came in with a bottle of Grey Goose and sat at the bar. We were pretty sure they were a band. They ordered cranberry juice, tonic, and Red Bull, and got to drinking. Some local ladies came by trying to pick them up, and eventually some of them wandered off with the girls. They were highly entertaining to watch.
After lunch, Matt and I went back over to Time Square to see if the ATM was broken. Of course it wasn’t, because it only worked every other day. We did a bunch of souvenir shopping for the people back home, and made sure to pick up some Grey’s Spicy Sauce. I knew we could find Pickapeppa at home, but I had no idea whether I’d be able to find Grey’s or not. It’s made down the road in Sav.
We ran into Junior on the side of the road. He hit us up for cash, but I don’t think he remembered us. We stopped at Shamrock again for pop and rum, and went to hang out on the patio again for sunset and drinkin’. We played cards and hung out overlooking the ocean.
Round about 7pm or so, we decided to wander back up to Margaritaville, because Matt wanted to get his parents’ souvenirs from their shop. Also: yards. You can’t go wrong.
It was fairly quiet; apparently Friday is not a resort night at Jimmy’s place. We had dinner and drinks at a table on the beach, and watched a group of guys trying to pick up a 17-year-old girl who was there with her mother. The worst part was that her mother didn’t care, and was maybe a little too slutty. After dinner, we paid our tab and went to shop for the folks. Then we grabbed seats at the bar, and commenced watching sports on their TVs, which led to the inevitable Kobe/Lebron debate. It’s our longstanding tradition.
We watched poker and British Sportscenter, while my phone updated me with hockey scores via text. It’s really difficult to get upset about your favorite Gophers getting destroyed back home while you’re sitting at a bar on the beach, drinking rum. Orsi texted plans for meeting the next day; their plane was arriving in the afternoon, and we planned to go up to the cliffs to meet them in the evening.
We headed out once the place was devoid of anyone but staff, and took off down the beach. It was surprisingly quiet for a Friday, but then it’s a place where day of the week doesn’t really matter much. We met up with a couple hustlers trying to sell weed; the old guy latched onto Matt, while the younger one managed to pull me back and ask, “who is he to you?” Man, those dudes are aggressive. It’s kind of hilarious.
Back at our room, we finally saw the tiny lizard in full view. He’s the cutest thing ever!!
One of the hotel cats also followed us back. She reminded me of my Chiva:
We decided to hang out on the patio, and do various things that resulted in a plantain-chip-throwing contest. There were roosters in the yard next door, so we were trying to give them food. This resulted in failure, of course; there were just plantain chips scattered all over the parking lot. We did prove, however, that Matt is way better at that sport than I am. We then had a long debate about what portion of cheese bun you can successfully throw, and arrived at 1/6th. It made far more sense at the time, even though I had no intention of throwing my cheese bun at all. I was saving that for later.
And the rest will be edited out for decency’s sake.
Saturday morning, I had trouble with the time change thing and woke at 4:30am. I forced myself to go back to sleep til 7, lest I encounter a beating from my sister. We were on the road around 8, in search of coffee and then tourism, in order of importance. We drove up to Griffith Park, having heard the observatory offered the best view of the city.
Well, the hike was a lot longer than we thought. And steeper. And incredible. Halfway up the mountain, you have excellent views of the whole city to the southwest, as well as the Hollywood sign. Closer to the top, you can see the mountains to the north, and at the summit you have a 360-degree view.
There were a lot of people getting their daily workout on that hill. I was marveling at the joggers, some of whom were moving at a pace not much faster than our walk. I couldn’t believe people would run up that path, so I had to try it. It was exhausting, but somehow not as bad as I thought. I spent the rest of the hike wanting to run a lot, but knowing I might get a) yelled at or b) dehydrated.
We got Dick (the maturity level is high with us, yes indeed) and found ourselves a Trader Joe’s near the park. We bought fresh fruit and such for a picnic, then headed back to the beach at Santa Monica. The place was crazy, with the people on the promenade and the pier. It was sunny and would’ve been pretty warm if it weren’t for the wind. We crossed to the pier, went down to the beach, and had lunch, and then I laid on the blanket for a while. When it got too cold, we headed up to the pier, walking down to the end where we were nearly blown off into the ocean.
We decided to head back into LA to cover the obligatory touristy stuff, hoping we’d get more time at the ocean when the wind wasn’t quite so intense.
We stopped for coffee before heading to the La Brea tarpits. Stephanie was amused at the Chinese businessmen in Starbucks who kept reading my hoodie; I was just hoping it didn’t say something offensive.
There was some big event going on at the Kodak Theatre, the whole red carpet/limo bit, and the impersonator-folks were out in force. We saw Darth Vader and a Stormtrooper, Superman, Catwoman with her ass exposed, Beetlejuice, a fat Spiderman, and various others. Grauman’s was mobbed as always. We took a look at the footprints and the stars on the street, and were generally unimpressed. Hollywood celebs don’t do a whole lot for me.
We took Sunset Boulevard into Beverly Hills, and spend some time driving through the neighborhoods gawking at stars’ homes. Again, not so impressive. We drove way up in the hills, and then down again, and could smell Dick’s brakes. We decided to let him rest for a while, so we drove down to Rodeo Drive to check out the shopping. I didn’t expect I’d find anything to interest me there, but then I found the Taschen store. I love their books. I didn’t see anything different than what Amazon could sell me for cheaper, but it was cool to see all their stuff in one place. We went up to Via Rodeo and saw the really high-end stuff. I admit it’s an irritating habit of mine to get pissed off about it, but I do. God knows I can shop, but there’s a level at which spending that amount of cash on something becomes really obscene. Anyway. My sister pointed out a Maserati on the street, which I guess was a big deal. We’d been seeing Bentleys all day, so I wasn’t sure how it was different.
We walked a long ways along the water. I was searching for whole sand dollars and beach glass, both of which are usually hard to find but seemed in abundance there. Stephanie was freaking out over the jellyfish, especially when we found a huge one laying there, still quivering. We tried to decide whether it was still alive, and whether it made sense to try to push it back into the ocean. It washed back out anyway, and by now has probably stung an unsuspecting surfer.
I found it fascinating. I threw it back, on the off chance it might help the victim somehow.
With an hour and a half left to go, I was bored to death. I took photos out the airplane window. I wrote a poem. I wrote down the pattern for the throw pillows I was making, because I just made it up but they were coming out beautifully. I ate some trail mix. I interrupted Stephanie some more. I organized my bag. I kept trying to check the time on my phone, and kept finding it turned off. I peered out the window at South Dakota, and finally Minnesota. And then we were home, and it was even colder than in California.
Each time the pilot got on the radio to tell us our cruising altitude or arrival time or to apologize for the unexpected turbulence over 
I had the good fortune of parking right in front of a natural foods ice-cream shop that wanted to sell me a sugar-free frozen yogurt sundae, which was awesome, because that’s exactly what I wanted to buy. We headed to the beach with our yogurt, laid out the towel, and sat down to watch the ocean. Heather fed the menacing seagulls raisins, and I watched the cruise ships heading out to sea. She presented her plans for Epcot II, which will feature all the countries America doesn’t like, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. We discussed the awesome food they’ll serve there, and arrived at the startling conclusion that we hate all the countries with flatbreads. It’s chilling.
We stopped at a little Cuban cafe for plaintains and Cuban coffee, then headed back to Orlando. We met up with my family having dinner at Disney’s Pop Century resort. The place was bizarre; each of the buildings is named and decorated to correlate with a decade starting with the 1950s. The 1990s building, the one in which we were staying, had giant cellphones on the corners of the building (set to dial 407-W-DISNEY, of course), and huge CDs. The 1980s building had Pac Man across the top. Each of the structures also had various catchphrases from each era in giant letters atop them: ours had ‘You go, girl!’, ‘Y2K’, ‘Yo’, and other such painful reminiscences.
It started raining again, so I headed for a little beach cabana. Heather and I huddled at the back of our beach chairs to keep out of the wind and rain, but, dammit, I was at the ocean again.
On the way out of town, we stopped for coffee; all the Starbucks baristas were singing along with that Natalie Merchant song about getting older, and complaining about their pathetic barista lives. We took a detour to the town of Juliette, home of the Whistle Stop Cafe (of 
We had discovered it in the AAA guide the last time we were in Georgia, and Heather has had recurring fantasies involving their biscuits and sweet tea ever since. They’re only open for ‘luncheon’ during the week. The kitchen is in the middle of the little building, with a lunch counter facing it. There’s a hallway on either side, and then dining rooms that branch out from there. The rooms are small and connect together like a maze. One of them has a large table with eight seats around it; another has two huge old creaking booths and nothing else. The seating is á la VFW post, cheap veneer tables and vinyl chairs. The waitress brought us the bread, which is amazing: buttermilk biscuits and little corn bread sticks. I asked her where the restrooms were located, and she gestured off towards the distance somewhere, saying, “through that door, you take a right and a right and a left and a left.”
I love the south.
Leaving the restaurant, I again felt like crap, so Heather got to drive. I passed out for half an hour in the passenger seat, then felt like returning to the living. She informed me that I had missed the bamboo farm that I was intentionally looking out for, and then pointed out the hurricane evacuation crossovers that allow people to drive on both sides of the freeway while running for their lives. We figured those would probably be in use before long, since Hurricane Isabel was headed that way. At 2:50, I sighted my first seagull. We were getting near the ocean.
(Tybee island is on the Atlantic, 20 miles east of Savannah, across a series of bridges and causeways, and past miles of seagrass, turtle crossings, and palm trees.) The girl at the counter called me honey and sweetie and told me I was very striking. I swooned.
I called the parents to let them know we had arrived safely. They couldn’t believe how quickly we had gotten there, and I could hear my dad silently calculating driving times and speeds in his head, as usual. He highly disapproved of the fact that we had driven all night as well, of course. I told them about Atlanta and Macon and our early-morning visit to the Waffle House. Then my mom told me Johnny Cash had just died. That kind of dampened my enthusiasm for the beach.
We drove three blocks past our hotel and found the end of Highway 80, and a block and a half of little shops and restaurants. We went into a couple stores, which had everything on end-of-season clearance. Heather saw Ben & Jerry’s, so we stopped in, and discovered that their flavor of the month was sugar-free blueberry. Yay!
I got oatmeal with apples and cinnamon, and the world’s largest iced americano. From there, we walked down to the riverfront along the Factors’ Walk. It’s a level down from the rest of the downtown, with cobblestone streets built with the ballast from ships coming from England. The shops there are all pretty cheesy/touristy, and we stopped into one for postcards. One of the women who worked there came running at me from across the store, raving about my hair. And, yes, I had to admit, my hair was perfect. We had named it ‘ocean hair’, because of the effect of the humidity. It was really curly, but not at all frizzy. I hardly had to do anything to it in the morning, just poke it around a little and spray it. It was magical. I wanted ocean hair to come home with me, but that was not to be.
On the way to the hotel, we stopped again at Jaycees Park to see if our ducks were still around. Heather found a gigantic, cranky blue heron, various other waterfowl, tiny fish, and finally, the ducks. This time, we came armed with some styro-corn chips from Schnucks, so they were happy. We met a guy out walking his dog, Lucy. He called her a hound dog and said, “Y’all have a good night,” and I was charmed by his Georgia-ness. We stopped at our hotel, changed, and went back to the beach.