A day on the boardwalk

Yesterday we drove down to Ocean City to spend the day on the boardwalk. The last few years we've gone to OC for 4 or 5 days with my family (my BIL, SIL and kids and my parents) but this year with the Mexico trip and my parents not having made it up north from Florida yet it's not going to happen. Z. really loves these vacations, especially because she's with her cousin J. but while going with her parents for a few hours isn't quite the same we figured it was better than nothing.

We've come to the realization that none of the three of us are beach people so there was no question that this trip would just be about the boardwalk. I thought that Z. might want to go on some amusement park rides, but no. I asked her this morning if it was because J. wasn't there to ride with and she said yes. Not quite the same riding with your mother I guess. She was also not wanting to play mini-golf but we overrode her on that one and she ended up having a great time. We also played skee-ball and I (drum roll please!) scored 2, count them, 2 one hundred scores! I had one game that was 320! I am not usually a good skee-ball player (in fact I also had a 90 score on one game which is the least you can get if you manage to get all the balls into a hole). Z. was really annoyed with me LOL. A. managed to score a 320 game too, but without the 100 score. He said he has never gotten it into the 100 hole so I was feeling pretty pleased with myself :-)

One of the main objectives of board-walking is eating junk food, which we are normally pretty careful about avoiding. So, we ate junk food and enjoyed every minute of it. A slice of Mack and Manco pizza for lunch and a Kohr Bros. frozen custard for dessert (vanilla for Z. and me, hers with rainbow sprinkles of course, and a coffee/dulce le leche twist for A.). Later on we shared a Curly fries (the seasoned curly ones) which kind of sat in my stomach like a lead balloon. I tried not to eat too many, but I should have eaten less. To bring home we bought a little bit of fudge and salt water taffy for Z. (who ate a few pieces throughout the afternoon), fresh roasted peanuts in the shell (still hot, yum, of course we had to sample a few right then and there) and refilled our bucket of caramel corn ($1 off for bringing back your plastic tub, we bring it back every year) which you can get with the top off, so it's mounded on top, which of course means you have to eat that part before putting the top on, so we did.

Later on for dinner Z. got another slice of pizza and I was lured by the sign for beer battered onion rings (I knew I would only eat a few so offered to share them with A.) and A. ordered some kind of battered (or maybe it was breaded) chicken pieces with buffalo sauce (advertised as boneless chicken wings but I think it was breast meat chunks, I tried one, it was okay, not great). Then Z. and I went to the frozen custard place and she got her usual vanilla with rainbow sprinkles and I decided to be daring and try the coffee (plain, no twist flavor). Normally I am disappointed when I try another flavor besides vanilla when having frozen custard, but the coffee was really good and I would order it again.

We shopped a bit too as we walked up and down and back and forth along the boardwalk, mostly for Z. (and food). We bought her a $5 OC tee shirt (she needs a new one as she's getting bigger and she likes her tee shirts oversized). We also bought her a starfish (remember the starfish she wanted in Veracruz? I did promise to get her one in OC). At the collectible section in the Surf Mall (where you can go to an oxygen bar) there were individual Pokemon cards, 2 for 93 cents on one shelf, so big spender that I am I let her pick out 4 cards. She was thrilled with her finds. One of the most important purchases was the metal embossed OC license plates with names on them. Last year we were so thrilled to find one for Z. as we never see her name on any of those personalized things, and to find my name spelled with one "L" as it is always spelled the wrong way with two "L"'s (my apologies to any of the two "L"ed Michele's out there, but that is just plain wrong LOL!). We were so excited that we bought them but completely forgot to look for one for A.! We needed to get one for him and then of course one for the cat Calvin (which we found, OC is definitely the place to go for those hard to find names). All 4 of them are up on the little bulletin board in our kitchen now.

We lucked out with the weather. Silly us didn't bother to check a forecast past 4 days before we went, so as we got on the highway we turned on the radio and the shore forecast was "heavy, gusty thunderstorms in the afternoon". Ooops! We decided to keep going and take our chances. On the way down we went through a couple spots with torrential rain (lots and lots of cars pulled off to the side, but we didn't think it was bad enough to have to do that). We got there around noontime and within an hour it started to rain but it never got very heavy so we just ignored it (although we did start walking towards the section of the boardwalk closest to our car, just in case). We stayed till around 6:30pm or so and at that point the skies looked pretty ominous. We hit a lot of torrential rain and thunder and lightening storms driving home (the lightening was quite spectacular to look at), so our timing was pretty good.



The sky looked pretty cool about an hour or so before we left.

I figured my blood sugars would be horrendous this morning after all that junk food, but amazingly they were fine. Must have been all that walking. Poor Z. woke up in the middle of the night and woke up A. (that was so nice of her to wake him up and let me sleep) to complain. He gave her some tylenol and put her feet up on a bolster pillow she has and she did fall back asleep. Maybe it's time to get her new sneakers? My feet were fine (although A. said his were sore too).

So the summer seems more complete now that we had a few hours at the shore. Honestly, that's all we needed, just a few hours and we were all happy.