Posted on September 26, 2009 - by Ashley Jackson

On the Beach, Part III

Whoops! I left dinner out of my last post. This was dinner for Wednesday night:

Steak and baked potato, and a shot glass full of Brummel and Brown. Given that I’ve eaten just a baked potato for dinner on some recent nights, and that that potato was smaller than this one…this was way too much food. And I ate it anyway. And it was good, but I got into the pool later that night and was worn out after 20 minutes of swimming. And I was goofing off and launching off the wall into a backstroke, ended up going sideways, and rammed into the edge of the pool. I felt fine Thursday but since last night one of the muscles in my chest (the one that hurts a lot right now if I pretend I’m backstroking!) has been really sore–if I lay on my stomach or cough or move wrong it hurts. Baaaaah!

Could it be that the beach posts are almost over…?

Thursday, September 24: Day 6

No breakfast picture, so I’m assuming I had a donut. We were going to go to Broadway at the Beach in the afternoon so we could go to Margaritaville for dinner, but we decided to go ahead and go to Barefoot Landing and Broadway and then have Margaritaville for lunch.

On our way out of the resort, we fed the ducks. We were throwing bread to them in the water, but a bunch of them came up onto the walkway.

At one of the fudge places at Barefoot Landing, I saw this cool sign!

I only wanted to buy two things at either Barefoot Landing or Broadway at the beach: fudge and something for my dog. We stopped into Bone Appetit, an all-natural dog treat bakery. They had a little display case full of specially made treats–”donuts” (bagels with yogurt and sprinkles), gingerbread men, etc. They also had ten different varieties of treats that you could buy in half-pound or pound bags. Not knowing whether Heath would enjoy an entire bag of one kind of treat, I opted for the “doggie bag” option–filling a bag with loose treats from the buckets around the store.

They had peanut butter, beef & cheese…

…cheese pizza, chicken parmesan…

…cheese & apple, apple cinnamon (the only kind I didn’t get–seemed a little weird for a dog!)…

…peanut butter & honey, cheese & bacon…

….lamb & rice, and pumpkin!

I scooped some of all of them (except the apple cinnamon) into a bag and came out almost exactly at a pound–I think I hit 1.02 lb. Perfection!

They also had cute stuffed animals, and I couldn’t resist getting Heath this little guy.

He has a treat pouch and a squeaker, and supposedly he is made of triple-layers of fabric so he’ll be long-lasting. Heath loves him and while he has already managed to untie the knots in his arms, there are no holes so far. He might even make it through the week…!

We went on to Broadway at the Beach and Margaritaville.

Margaritaville, like Thorny’s, is a beach tradition. I decided to get something different this time and had a hard time choosing what i wanted. Finally, I went with the Monterey Chicken Sandwich.

I would have been happy just ordering my sandwich and eating–I was hungry!–but my dad and my aunt wanted to order the nachos (the inferior nachos!), so I had a plateful (or two) while waiting for my food to arrive. They do have good guacamole…but they’ve taken the bacon off their nachos! Shameful.

When my food arrived, it looked delicious!

Unfortunately, I’m so used to hunting for wheat bread made without oats that I didn’t think about whether the wheat bun might be, say, covered in oats. I avoid eating things made with oats because oats make me sick (and also because they’re naaasty). I ate about 1/3 of the bun and left the rest of it on my plate.

It was pretty good–needed more chicken, and I didn’t taste any cajun seasoning in the mayo. The french fries were nommy, as french fries usually are, and the pickle was very sour but good.

We didn’t eat dinner until late that night because we were so full from Margaritaville…but dinner was the taco salad I’d been looking forward to all week, so I laid into it.

…I had another, smaller plateful after this one, while moaning about how I’d eaten too much.

And that’s it! No more beach pictures! I got up Friday morning, had a donut that I did not take a picture of, and drove back home. Oh, and I stopped at the last gas station before I got onto I-95 and got a Diet Caffeine Free Coke and a huge Nutty Bar that had like 420 calories in it…I checked out the healthy food section and there was nothing I could eat (oats!). I tried. A little…

Tomorrow I’ll hit the rest of Friday and today, and then I’ll be all caught up. Yaaaay…