Xmas Vacation

Something I learned on vacation. If you are going to travel on Xmas day, pack your dinner. Xmas night, I had a 2-day old sausage from a Circle K store (they were out of hot dogs). The only good part of this meal was the chips and beer side dishes.

So we left during the snowstorm as fast as we could to beat the storm on our trip to Florida. We were about 30 minutes ahead of the freezing temperatures. Slept in Baton Rouge. Don't think I'll ever stop there again. 

The next day on to Panama City Beach, Florida.  The hotel was old, but it was awesome....except for the talking elevator lady. Yikes. She screamed at us: GOING DOWN!  The hotel was very inexpensive this time of year and right on the beach with a big patio. It also had a kitchenette...which means you can store your own drinks in a full-sized refrigerator. Bonus!

So this trip was the ying and yang of food. Ying was the 2-day old sausage. Yang was the best baked oysters and fried green tomatoes ever. Dusty's Oyster Bar is awesome....if you don't mind drinking out of plastic cups and using plastic forks. The oysters had crab meat, Parmesan cheese, and jalapenos and they had the best fried green tomatoes I've eaten, but to be honest, I've only had them a few times in my life. This place was so awesome, we went there twice.

St. Andrews beach...voted best in US...check. Disappointed that I didn't see any alligators at alligator lake, but the beach was beautiful. Took a trip to Appalachicola...oyster capital of Florida. Not too impressed. Lots of boutiques and I'm not much of a shopper. We were told what restaurant to go to for oysters. We were not even hungry, but we figured we had to have Florida's freshest oysters. Well our oysters were so fresh they were still in the ocean. We go for an early lunch and tell the waitress we aren't hungry, but must try the oysters. She comes back and says they ran out. True story...my friends. We did see the oyster guys raking the ocean for oysters, so that was kind of cool.

Stopped by the USS Alabama.  I talked to Col. Frazier and got a signed copy of his book Hell's Guest.  He is a former POW and 90 years old. What a great guy. 

The last part of the trip had very few pictures and the ones we had were on a phone and probably don't need to be shown. New Orleans baby. To me, New Orleans is much like Las Vegas. You can only live through two days of it. Again, the food was awesome. I had some shrimp yaya that was to die for. Listened to some great Cajun music...I think that is it...the ones where they play the spoons on the chest thingy.

Here's me by the spoon guy. This picture about sums up how New Orleans went down on this trip. Fortunately, I feel like a real light weight when in NOLA. The double shots started in the hotel lobby at 9am before the Saints game....and I was eating a breakfast with NO cocktails.