Myrtle Beach - 2010

I am finally getting around to placing some beach pictures on the blog.  I didn't take as many this year as in year's past - no particular reason really - except maybe I slept in more often than not this year ... :P

Did the usual - beach (no water for me though), pool and lazy river tube float (yes, got in water this time around), out-to-eat (some new places some old but still good places (River City hamburgers, Chestnut Hill for our 'good meal' of the week, and a new place called Flying Fish - where Georgia took great pleasure in tossing the fish, golf and shopping. 

We also did something new this year that had not been seen in years past - got Dad on the beach.  But, we had to coax him with a game of Bocce to do it - and as it turned out he was the best one at the game.  It reminded him of his championship penny-tossing days in Alto I suppose.  Soooooooo, what is Bocce you ask?  It is an Italian (or Greek, or Roman, etc) game whereby you toss out a small white ball and then teams toss their somewhat larger ball after it in the hopes their ball is closest to the white ball after everyone has tossed theirs. Of course, 'toss' implies throwing with relative ease and slow speed - until it is time to knock your opponents ball to Kingdom-Come, i.e. knock his/her ball away from the white ball - and then all bets are off.   

Now you have to realize that this family is relatively calm, cool, and collected at all times - until it comes to competitive activities - then it is Attila the Hun meets Genghis Khan; which is fitting I suppose because I'm imagining that the game actually began as the head of your enemy being tossed about and other heads being tossed as well.  Suffice to say, I can't imagine what the rules of that game would be - hey, I think of these things without a lot of detail okay.  To say Bocce (or dominos, or cards, or, well, fill in the blank) was competitive is putting it mildly - I guarantee you that we were the only Bocce game on the beach using a tape-measure to ensure no one got the least bit of an advantage.  Anyway, it became known fairly soon that spouses versus spouses didn't work - at all; especially since the ringer (that would be Dad) always ended up on the winning side.  When this trend started to show itself, we quickly changed the teams up (either that or die).  Even Mom got into the action and finally came to realize that the beach (the playing field) was slanted towards the ocean and therefore tossing her ball directly at the white ball resulted in her ball curving away each and every time.  We finally had to pick out inordinate objects around the beach and tell her to toss it in that direction - being careful not to choose something too close unless she tried to cold-cock what we told her to aim at.  In the end, I do believe that everyone was on a winning team at least once.

We did see one cool thing one day - we noticed all the people vacating the water (ocean) and we first heard that there were sharks in the water.  We finally found out that it wasn't sharks at all but a school of sting rays migrating up the coast (and they soon came back down the coast so I guess their migration is a relatively short one).  The odd looking picture of people standing on the beach is the one with the rays in it.  I was on the balcony (10th floor) and took the picture - click on it and look closely at the upper left hand corner (dark brown spot in water) - those are the rays.  Of course, I was waiting for a man-eating shark so I could take the Pulitzer prize winning photo - no such luck though.       

We (the guys) only played golf once this year - just too bloody hot to play. Temps were in the 90's with matching humidity. The day we did play though we changed up the format some - Dad and I teamed up whereby I did all the driving and fairway shots, and chipping and Dad did all the putting - and we shot an 89 - Ken and Al shot, well, something a tad higher than that. Was a lot of fun - but it was just way too hot so when Greg showed up at mid-week, we didn't get back out there, less we wanted to melt like the bad witch in The Wizard of Oz.  We even encountered Ally the alligator on one of the holes - and she looked hungry, and since we were already fried, we decided to move on quickly.  

We also had visitors this year - Brian and Whitney came over from Charlotte on Friday and spent the last night with everyone.  We went to River City that night.  As they say, good time had by all.

BOCCE 

LAZY RIVER

GOLF