The end days/ great weather edition!

Thursday, August 7

As I mentioned, Thursday was looking to be a great weather day, and it was!!

We got a plethora of blue skies and hot sunshine all day beginning in the morning:

As I also mentioned, the seaweed that was hanging around mostly moved out to deeper water. Yay!

After our usual balcony time, we headed down to the beach. I guess I don’t have anything too exciting to really say here, besides that it was really wonderful.

We spent a long time swimming and floating in the (now clear) water. Glorious, clear, pleasant temperature (not cold at all!) water. All the reasons we typically love FL in August.

I also spent a long time sitting at the water’s edge in my beach chair.

The boys alternated between ocean/pool/and boarding.

You can see the nice clear water here!

At some point Ivan and I took a leisurely walk down the beach. Basically it was a perfect beach day. 🙂

Around lunchtime Ivan and my dad drove over to a nearby local seafood market to order some peel and eat shrimp. They came back with 3 lbs of steamed and ready to eat shrimp, a big order of delicious red potatoes and a key lime pie.

We’ve ordered peel and eat shrimp from this place before and it’s SO GOOD!!! So good.

It is also a perfect beachy lunch, not too heavy or anything.

After lunch, we resumed our positions. 🙂 At some point later several of us moved up to the pool.

This was great overall, minus the boys being rather annoying in the pool, roughhousing and play fighting, a bit too much jumping/flipping/semi-dangerous boy things happening (at least the pool was otherwise mostly empty)… Note to younger parents, apparently the age where you get to completely stop harping on kids about their behavior on vacation is… not 15 and 17. 🙄

After pool + hot tubbing + reading/relaxing, we finally dragged ourselves upstairs. We had planned to go out for dinner, so we had to get showered and cleaned up.

Ready to go!

We debated where to go… at first we thought more seafood, but many of the beachfront seafood places don’t take reservations and it was sort of smack dab in the middle of the dinner hour. Another place we wanted to go was pretty far away, and would likely have a long wait..

We ultimately decided to check out this (HUGE) new Irish Pub Steakhouse called McGuire’s which was just like 3 minutes up the road. Our VRBO host had said it was a “not to miss” place for everyone. It had a ginormous parking lot and seemed super packed every time we drove by, so we were a little leery, but it worked out great! We only had to wait maybe 15-20 minutes (like I said, it’s a huge place).

They have a whole outdoor bar and waiting area with yard games, plus a fun double decker bus gift shop, etc. Super fun vibe there!

It has multiple rooms inside plus a big bar and very fun + cozy decor. Our waiter was awesome- the sweetest and friendliest guy who is in Florida temporarily from Croatia on a university summer work exchange program.

They immediately delivered 2 loaves of this delicious bread drizzled in honey for the table:

They make their own beer and only sell their own brews.

They have a diverse menu. Their big thing is steak. I’m not a huge steak eater, but apparently (according to the server + menu), they’re one of fewer than 5% of steakhouses in the U.S. that serve Prime grade beef.

I ended up opting for something from the Irish menu, a shepherd’s pie and an Irish Red beer.

Asher got a steak burger- they are 3/4 lb burgers. That is one big ass burger! In general all their portions are huge. We also got 2 portions of their special “18 cent bean soup” which you can add on with any entree. It’s apparently known as “Senate bean soup” because it’s the same recipe that has been served to the Senate cafeteria for years (and they sell it for the same original price, 18 cents). Kind of quirky but we tried it and it was super super good!!

Of course eating bread, drinking a beer, and eating a bunch of (very filling) bean soup meant I barely put a dent in my shepherd’s pie!! 😅 Not joking, I think there were 4 cups of cheesy mashed potatoes on top of the steak/veggie filling. 🤣 I tried my best but a huge majority went into a box…(was very yummy though!).

It was a really fun dinner and we all found the food to be great, too. A good choice and popular place for a reason!

Checked out the bar on the way out, where they have live Irish music every night beginning at 9 pm. We were stuffed and anyway still wanted to go to the hot tub before they closed at 10, so we decided maybe we’d try and stop back for music on our last night.

We made it to the hot tub and pool by a little after 9 and stayed there (we had it mostly to ourselves except for one young couple for a few minutes) until they closed it up at 10:15! It was another beautiful night.

Friday… last full day! 😭

Thankfully, we had more great weather on Friday. I felt really bummed to already be at our last day!! 😢😢 I could easily have kept doing “this” (aka relaxing/not too much) for probably at least another week…

I think our trip got a bit of a slow start for me, with the crummy weather out of the gate and adjusting to a “new place”, but as the week went on, the condo resort actually really grew on me!

I was a little unsure at first, just given some differences from what we were “used to”, but it ended up working out really well. By the end the boys actually said they liked it better than our usual place! So that was a win in my book.

I mean, the spacious condo and the HUGE balcony with incredible views and being directly on the oceanfront are all really hard to beat. It is key for our family to have a good pool area and hot tub, which this place does have (2 of each).

The things we didn’t like were more nit picky- for example, the hot tub doesn’t open until 9 am, and we used to like going down to the hot tub in the early morning with coffee/tea at our old place. The pool water was also colder here, and the old place had a better landscaped, more inviting pool area. We had some intermittent issues with the elevators- there are 3, but one was out of service all week- and for a brief while, a second one went down! (Thankfully that one got fixed promptly). It’s a 23 floor high rise building, so 1 elevator does NOT cut it! We also missed the more traditional hotel lobby serving coffee, tea, etc at our old hotel. The new place is a condo complex, so there’s not really a “lobby”. Fortunately though, we can obviously make our own tea and coffee in the full kitchen, and there was a fantastic convenience store just a 3 minute walk away (with coffee, cappuccino, cold beverages and a million snacks, pastries, etc for sale.)

But all in all, this place was a great choice and I personally would go back! We especially loved the 3 bedrooms/3 bathrooms and the full kitchen was great (old place more of a small kitchenette and a more standard hotel room… now that the boys are older, having our own rooms is soooo preferred!).

Anyway, of course we started Friday on the balcony…. 🙂 I could so get used to this.

Eventually my mom and I walked down to the convenience store for some drinks and a package of donuts. 😉 The beach also looked like it might be busier than other days (being Friday), so I went down and left our chairs and umbrella there to make sure we got a good spot!

Beach time!

The water was so beautiful, very calm today. Just perfect!! The boys and I floated and chatted.. eventually Iván and my mom came out, too.

After the whole morning at the beach, we took a break from the heat and sun, “sort of” cleaned up (I literally left my swimsuit top on under my tank top…) and went out for a final beachfront lunch at Pineapple Willy’s, a popular place Asher specifically wanted to try. It’s ranked #1 on TripAdvisor, so it’s harder to get in at night.

Fortunately, at lunchtime many people are on the beach! So we got right in.

We got an amazing table, way at the end, right on the water.

I had the grilled mahi mahi BLT with a fresh pineapple salsa. It was really good!!

Asher, aka Rico Suave 😜

After lunch, back to the beach/pool. (Just realizing now these may not be the most riveting trip recaps, lol. Oh well!)

I love these photos though. We didn’t get any rain, but the sky turned a bit grayer and I just loved the color combos.

My parents went in the ocean with the boys for a little bit. Ivan and I sat in our chairs on the edge and I lazily squeezed the sand as each wave came in, collecting any seashells I came across.

Look at this cool collection I ended up with! Seriously, these all just came to my chair, and I feel like it’s such a perfectly balanced variety! 🙂 What luck.

Didn’t want to go upstairs… we lingered.

Some of us ended up in the hot tub for a LONG time- literally over an hour! Lol. The air cooled off just enough, and I made occasional dips into the chilly pool back and forth. We got talking to a man there with his kids from Louisiana for a long time.

I don’t think we went upstairs until well after 7. Had to milk the final beach day.

Lucky for us, it was going to be the best sunset day yet.

Drying off/waiting for the sunset. My usual “spot” this week…

A cloud free sunset!

The sky and colors were just gorgeous.

Insanely beautiful!! Loved this so much.

Washed my face and put my hair in a ponytail, and called it good enough. We wanted to go out on the fishing pier on our last night!

We headed to the Pier Park area, where the long fishing pier is. It’s a family tradition that we walk out onto it at least one night on our trips here to watch the fishermen. (They used to fish for shark there and it was crazy to watch! Sounds like that’s not really allowed anymore.)

First though, we decided to stop for a couple of appetizers at the Brass Tap. After our bigger and later lunch, none of us really wanted a full “dinner”… basically we wanted a snack. Lol.

This is the same place we went on Monday; it’s one of the few places in PCB with really great craft beer and they have some delicious food too.

We didn’t stay long- just enough for a quick bite before moving on to the pier. (Good thing we stopped, because we learned they are actually closing next week, after over 10 years in business. We’re super bummed as it’s a place we always like to stop when we visit. Some issue with the lease and price increases, per the server. Sad!!)

Next up, the fishing pier. It’s right off the main tourist area, by Pier Park.

Paid our spectator rates and entered:

It was just the most gorgeous night. The pier was surprisingly quiet, compared to past visits. It’s a very, very long pier and pleasant to just walk along in the dark, looking to see if anyone is catching anything.

Not too much action, but we chatted with a couple fishermen and asked a few questions.

Heading back:

By this point it was…after 10?! But being the ruckus rousers that we are (😆), we decided we still wanted to try and squeeze in a beer at that Irish place, to hear the live music!

Dropped the boys off at the condo and got a spot in the bar. There was indeed a live musician. Being pretty late, it wasn’t too busy, but a good number of people, too.

We had fun! The musician was good, not great, but fun nonetheless. I think the time stamp on the above photo was 12:09 am?! Party people! (I’m really… not. Ha. Vacations may make me out to be more exciting than I really am. ;))

Saturday, August 9

And that late night brings us to today! Saturday, check out day. Booooooo.

I woke up surprisingly early, given the late night- I was awake by 6:30 or so. Didn’t want to waste our final morning!! No one else was up yet though, so I made tea in my Yeti and decided to go walk on the beach.

It was so peaceful and nearly empty and just beautiful. Perfect final morning. 💕

I walked for 20 minutes and then turned around and walked 20 minutes back, sipping my tea. And also thinking, ugh I don’t want to go back to reality, how can I do this permanently, work is gonna suck next week, etc. Tried to push all those racing thoughts out and just soak up the calming ocean vibes as much as possible…

Then, after chilling on a towel for a bit, it was time to shower, pack up, etc.

Goodbye!

Now it’s 6:42 pm and we’re in Tennessee… about 33 miles out from our Hilton Garden Inn which will be our stopping point for the night.

Traffic finally light. It’s not been terrible, but a bit heavier and more stressful in some spots than preferred… several backups, accidents, etc. But not too bad. Will feel good to get off the road. Then another 8 hours of driving tomorrow before we finally make it home.

And Monday morning, I get to pick up Charlie!! Thursday it’s back to school for Ethan, so our summer is coming to an end already, somehow. This super relaxing week was a great way to bookend our summer and “close it out” on a high note. 🙂