If you’ve ever talked to Mel and I about our vacations you can probably guess how our first full day at the beach started.  Around 11:00AM we had brunch on the balcony and enjoyed the view and the sounds.  Then… we took a nap.

Once our liesurely day had finally gotten under way, around 2:00PM, we decided to go have a proper meal and headed to Pineapple Willie’s.  Mel had ribs and I had a Shrimp Po’boy.

Now Panama City Beach isn’t exactly new territory for almost anyone from Birmingham, but definitely not for Mel and myself who had been here dozens of times.  So when there’s something new, a place closing down or a new one opening up, we make a point to see it.  We haven’t been down in several years, however, so we had no idea that Pier Park, a monster of a mall, had been built and we stumbled across it as we took a drive up the coast.  Once we saw it, we had to stop in to take a look.  I needed a new pair of sunglasses anyhow!

We spent quite a while in the Sunglass Hut at Pier Park, working with the nice lady there who was studying to be an optometrist.  After a while, I finally decided on a pair of Polarized Oakley Half Jackets (black on black) and we headed out to check the rest of the mall.

One of our favorite things at the mall was a store called Kilwin’s where Mel tried about 20 different flavors of ice cream before finally settling on Turtle Cheesecake.  I went straight for Rocky Road out of the gate.  After we got our ice cream we headed down the mall a little bit to check out the German restaraunt down the way.  A nice hostess there tried to offer us beer in exchange for our ice cream, and we found out that the keyboard player from the Violent Femmes would be playing Friday night.  Too bad we wouldn’t be in town for that.

Satisfied that we would return to the mall to check out more of it we headed back to the condo to take a long walk on the beach.  By long, I mean two hour… and Mel is pregnant!  Along the walk we saw a fisherman going crazy thinking he had a Pompano on the line and instead pulling in a crab, several rays playing in the waves and me turning my ankle over with about two miles left to get back to the condo.  With one of us pregnant and one of us hobbled this significantly cut the chances that we would be taking more long walks on the beach.

We finally made it back to the condo in time to catch the sunset and get ready for dinner.

Mel has a tradition that whenever she’s in PCB she has to order in pizza one night.  So we decided tonight would be the perfect night for that.  We ordered from Marco’s and got pizza and wings (which were both awesome) and popped in “The Darjeerling Limited” DVD to check out this critically acclaimed film.  About 30 minutes later we turned that crap off and watched Braveheart on HBO instead.