Vacation Wrapup

We got back late Monday afternoon from our trip to Florida. I'm not going to try to write it all up in a coherent story, since I'm on Day 2 of Low Carbs and my brain is not working so well right now. I'm just going to throw it all out there in a series of musings in what is hopefully approximate chronological order.

1. Atlanta is hot.
2. Atlanta traffic still sucks. I-85 at 2pm on a Sunday afternoon and it's still wall to wall cars.
3. The Westin hotel in downtown Atlanta is still missing a lot of windows from the tornado back in March. It's sort of creepy to see that. I didn't see any other signs of tornado damage on the way through.
4. Buckhead has some really large buildings now that weren't there the last time I was in the area.
5. Atlanta had the most expensive gasoline I saw on the trip. The highest was $4.09, but fortunately I didn't have to pay that. The most I paid was $3.98 at the Florida/Alabama state line, so I still haven't had to buy gas for over four bucks yet in my life. I'm sure that's only a matter of time, however.
6. I played Wii for the first time at my friend Dave's house. It's pretty cool. We're going to consider getting one for Christmas. Wii Bowling and Mario Kart were both a lot of fun.
7. I had intended to do a lot of walking on the beach that week, but I ended up mostly sitting on the deck drinking beer with Uncle Gene.
8. My Uncle Johnny and his nephew caught a 7 foot Hammerhead shark while we were there off the pier. Pretty impressive looking. They cooked it up the next day and it wasn't too bad. I'd probably still rather just look at them swimming though.
9. I finished two books out of the four I took with me.
10. I failed to find good fried oysters in my two attempts. They tasted ok, but they were smaller than the tip of my thumb. I tried a few raw oysters that were much better.
11. Dobb's BBQ in Dothan was just terrible. I paid 12 bucks for a platter and it had two small scoops of pork and beef BBQ, along with 3 tiny ribs that had gristle all over them. Marissa got a BBQ sandwich that only cost 3.99 and it had almost as much meat on it. The only thing worth recommending was the hot sauce, but it's not worth going back for.
12. We spent a few hours at Gulf World in Panama City Beach on the day we drove back. It was pretty cool, but at 25 bucks a person I don't think it was quite worth it. The dolphins were the best part, and this was actually the first time I'd ever been to a dolphin show. I guess they need that much per person to pay for keeping them. I can see going there every few trips, but it's not a "can't miss" type place.
13. Panama City Beach has totally let itself get too big by the way. There are condo buildings there that are larger than almost any building you can find in Nashville or Birmingham. I can't imagine wanting to go to the beach and being surrounded by that many people. Mexico Beach, on the other hand, was practically deserted. There were about 15 to 20 families on the stretch of beach we were on, and even the pier was rarely crowded.
14. The Birmingham Zoo is a lot nicer than I remembered it being. We spent about 5 hours there this past Sunday with the whole Hatcher family. They have a better animal variety than the Nashville Zoo, plus they still have the train, which Jack of course loved.