On Thursday, we finally spent a considerable amount of time at the beach. We slept in and slathered ourselves in the appropriate (or so some of us thought) amount of sunscreen for a bunch of pasty folks and headed across the street. I have been to several different beaches, East Coast, West Coast, Gulf, and Caribbean and this is truly one of the prettiest beaches I've ever seen. The sand was white, almost like sugar, and the water was a beautiful shade of aqua. The weather was great too, with sunshine and a bit of a breeze. It was also really clean and there wasn't much seaweed or animal life in the water. We enjoyed relaxing, whether in the shade under our umbrellas, or along the waterside. We are all people watchers too, and beaches are a great spot for that. We spent a couple of hours at the beach before we headed back to the condo for lunch. We had to be careful not to sunburn ourselves early in the trip.

After a relaxing day at the beach, we had plans to meet up with Shayne to get our pictures and then head out to dinner at McGuire's Irish Pub. We were moving slow, so Mom and Dad got the pictures and we met them at the restaurant. We had prescreened the menu before we went out to eat so we were pretty excited by all of our different food and drink options. McGuire's was a pretty cool place and I really thought all the dollars hanging from the ceiling was an interesting touch. We started with beverages, with tropical drinks for some and great beers for others. We were also excited for appetizers and selected Reuben eggrolls and Irish boxtys. The eggrolls were different from anything I'd had, but was very yummy. The boxtys, which were basically deep fried garlic mashed potatoes, were delightful. I probably could have made a full meal of those. For our entrees, we mixed it up, with Mom and Katie ordering fish, Dad and I getting burgers, and Mike and Aaron going full Irish with corned beef and cabbage and a Shepherd's pie. The sheer amount of food was huge and we were all stuffed afterwards. Unfortunately, this was probably my least favorite meal, mainly because my burger was overdone. Otherwise it was great, and we had a fun time here. When we returned to the condo, we took time to look at our amazing pictures on the tv and spent time figuring out how to easily make them accessible to everyone.

The New Austonian