Sorry for the delay. I was at my brother's house helping install a new fence in their backyard for the last 2 days...

Day 4
07.23.2003

We start our day the same as yesterday, that is, eating cheerios. We decide to peruse the hundred or so factory outlet stores a little bit up Highway 501. We walk around a bit, disinterested in most of the stores. I happened to see a music store as we were searching for a Tommy store for women. I went in to see if (ha ha) they had the new 311 cd. Wow! They actually did, and I picked it up and realized their tax is less than New Jersey's on cds. We continue walking and stop in our original destination to find nothing. We continue on to the Nike store, which was probably the busiest store there.

We proceeded to the snacky stand to buy a pretzel to hold our appetites until lunch, which we were looking forward to. We consumed our treats and entered the Big Dog store, where I purchased my dad a T-shirt. We began making our exit walk from the outlets, but stop in an Aeropostale, which had select good prices on mostly stuff people wouldn't buy. We also stopped in Nautica and Docker's to find ugly clothing, and crappy prices, respectively.

We leave and want to eat lunch. We want to hit up Captain George's, which is a seafood buffet. We drive over and pull in the back parking lot, noticing it's rather empty. We walk around looking for a back entrance, only to find a few stairs that lead to a wall. We turn and walk around to the front, where we discover that they open at 3. It's 2 now. Motherf... Since we are right across the street from Broadway at the Beach, and we're hungry, we go there to find food.

We park and find the info map. I see two places, a Japanese steak house, and Joe's Crab Shack, which both appear to be behind the Hard Rock Cafe, just over a bridge. Well, there was no bridge behind the Hard Rock Cafe, so we walked very briskly to the other side of this place. We go past Joe's, because it looked like a place where only white trash is welcomed. We walk a bit further and find out, hey, this steak house doesn't open until 4. OK, let's try Joe's since we're hungry. We go back and enter to find a line with a wait, and no ac. Motherf...We continue back to the other side of the park, where we started and become very sticky in the process because the humidity is near 100%. Disgusted, we get in our car to drive away. We end up going back down Highway 17, but I forgot that there's nowhere to eat really on 17, so we drive a while before I can find a u-turn. When we do, we turn around and I drive to the first place I could think of.

Fuddrucker's is always open during the day for lunch. We arrive and there is room to sit, and we eat lunch around 3:30 or so. We drive back to the hotel a while later and notice the sky is black behind us. Click. I take a picture. We go to our room to chill and digest our disgusting lunch.

Tonight we are going to see some baseball. Oh wait, no we're not. It starts raining and getting very windy. We decide we should cleanse our nastiness because we got really sweaty from our walk around Broadway. When I got out of the shower, I turned on the weather forecast to find that we had a Tornado Warning. Oh great. It was around 6. A tornado had hit maybe 10 miles to the north of us, and the cell extended to the south of us. Great. A tornado and we're in a high-rise with windows everywhere.

Luckily, the tornado warning expires without damage to us, but it continues to downpour. I call the Pelicans ticket office to see if the game was still on, because my tix were purchased online. The guy said, well, it may not start on time, but we're still going to play. Huh? Anyway, it continued to rain thru 8:30, so I don't think they got the game in at all. When we were finally ready, we started getting hungry, so we tried to go to Captain George's again.

When we pulled in, there were not many spots, and there was a cluster of people outside waiting. I ran in to see what the wait was, but the hostess said none for 2 people. Nice. I ran back to the car, got Kim and we were going to eat. This place was awesome inside. It was decorated with models of ships and fish, and the ceiling had a deep blue color with stars on it.

We made our way to the buffet to eat crab legs, some seafood medley, deviled crab, and something else. Devoured. Back for round 2, where we had some scallops, shrimp, some fish fillet, potatoes, rice, and a corn muffin. Also devoured, but with fullness setting in. We go back to browse the dessert table and pick up some fruit, pudding, cookies, and apple cobbler. This was a good meal. Expensive, but worthy. I just wish I could have eaten more. It was late, so we just went back to the room afterwards.

I wanted to not sleep in tomorrow to get to the beach before it rained, since we only had 2 more days left and it was supposed to rain both days.