Sorry this post is a little late...ENJOY!!!
April 28, 2011 packed and ready to go (around 6:30am) to Thunder on the Beach motorcycle Rally
and do a short visit with my mom and dad in Port Saint Joe, Florida. Started out as a beautiful day for a ride but ended up turning cold and had the look of rain.
Made it to mom’s house around 2:00pm, lunch was ready and I ate like a pig.
More or less, just hung around the house the rest of the day just shooting the bull with mom waiting on dad to get off work around 7:00pm.
Friday morning after a big breakfast, I decided to ride to Panama City beach to check out the rally. Road down the beach checking out the bikes as I putted along,
I was surprised how few bikes there were on the streets. The rally seemed down compared to 2008, the last time for me to attend the rally. Don’t get me wrong there were tens of thousands of bikes but just not the same as 2008 rally and it was Friday.
I pulled into one of the bikini bike wash,
as this was my hangout in 2008. (Old habits die hard) and snapped a few photos of passing bikers.
After that I headed back down the beach towards the Port, and made a wrong turn that ended up being a right turn. This ended up being a little road under heavy construction but near the end there were vendors set up in several locations…
more just t-shirt places, good place to get off your bike and walk around a little. Ended getting me a rally patch, but held off on the t-shirt…at 6’5” even the biggest shirt only fits once, one wash and they shrink to half its size.
Ended up getting home with a BAD headache, not sure what happened. I guess going all day without eating or drinking in the hot sun may have had something to do with it. Ha-ha. The next morning my dad did not have to go into work until 1:30pm so I spent the first part of the day with them…score…more free food. Dad took mom and me out to lunch at Papa Joes oyster bar & grill…food was most excellent!
I had the shrimp po-boy dad had crab paddies and mom had the fresh oysters…we also had some of the biggest fried crab claws I had ever seen as an appetizer. Mmm, Mmmm good to everything…nice call pops.
After dad went to work, I headed back to the rally around 3:00pm, got to say kind of the same old same old, just not that much going on. I snapped quite a few photos of riders,
I’ll post all of them on my faceBook account, here they are enjoy….
Thunder 1
Thunder 2
Thunder 3
Thunder 4
Woke up early Sunday morning around 5:00am (you guessed it to another huge breakfast) then after saying my goodbyes I was off…Petal, Mississippi here I come…got home around 12:00pm…nice ride.
Thanks mom and dad for the great weekend and all the free food!!!
I gained (I’m not kidding) 8 pounds in four days….good eating…back on the tuna fish now…
Till next time
Big Al
I LOVE MY JOB !!!
If you don't laugh out loud after you read this you are in a coma!
This is even funnier when you realize it's real!
Next time you have a bad day at work think of this guy.
Bob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana.
He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs.
Below is an email he sent to his sister.
She then sent it to radio station 103.5 on FM dial in
Indiana, who was sponsoring a worst job experience contest.
Needless to say, she won.
Read his letter below...
Hi Sue,
Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother.
Last week I had a bad day at the office.
I know you've been feeling down lately at work, so I
thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it's not so bad
after all.
Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job.
As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wet suit.
This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this:
We have a diesel powered industrial water heater.
This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature.
It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose.
Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints.
What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wet suit.
This floods my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi.
Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch.
So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my ass started to burn.
I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened.
The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit.
Now, since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it, however, the crack of
my ass was not as fortunate.
When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my ass.
I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator.
His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically.
Needless to say, I aborted the dive.
I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totalling
thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression.
When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet.
As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face,
handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber.
The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't shit for two days because my ass was swollen shut.
So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it
would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your ass.
Now repeat to yourself, 'I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.'
Whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad day?
May you NEVER have a jellyfish bad day! !!!!
Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift.
Well as you read in my last post, we were in Daytona for bike week and decided to try out another Dive, so off to Jacksonville we went. We took hwy 1A instead of the interstate due to hwy 1A runs right along side the beach (must ride for bikers…beautiful). Now I know we were in beautiful, Sunny Florida BUT it was cold this morning and the ride was somewhere around 80 miles, so needless to say we had quite the chill by the time we pulled into...
Singleton's Seafood Shack
We were a little early somewhere around 11:00am so there were only a few cars in the parking lot, we had the only motorcycles.
The Shack was just like I had imagined, right on the water,
with the smell of salt in the air, my kind of place. As you walked up on the small front deck it had an old wooden cable reel turned on it side for a table with old boats in the background.
Once in the door we were greeted as we walked by a table covered in ice with the fresh catch of the day laid out for all to see…fresh seafood, you can’t get much fresher than that.
We were seated by a large windows right on the water, the outside deck was being remodeled but I have to admit I was happy to be inside where it was warm, we had a bad case of the chills. Soon we were greeted by our waitress, what a sweetheart…we order our food with a side order of coffee;
she even went to the trouble to make my buddy Dave a pot of decaff. Service, service…we were expecting a couple of small cups, but to our surprise out came to extra large cups,
a welcome site to cold bikers.
Now that the coffee had done its job and warmed us up I had a chance to look around a little while waiting on lunch. The place was decorated in a nautical theme, fitting since the shack is sitting only feet from the water.
Then out came the food, it was lunch so we had both decided on po-boys…the waitress suggested that we split an order of fries the po-boys came dressed with shoe-string onion rings that were so deep on top of the po-boy that honestly you could not even see the sandwich.
Once I ate my way through the rings there it was in all it glory, lightly batter fresh, fresh shrimp on top of most excellent bread. Once I was able to squeeze the sandwich together, I had my first bite…heaven, true heaven. Man, that po-boy was good bite after bite, it’s the kind of food that truly makes you shed a tear once it gone…sniff, sniff.
Well the meal was over, we left a generous tip (well dissevered tip I might add) and headed to the counter to pay our bill, they sold many different kinds of hot sauce; I snapped a photo of my favorite.
Disturbing...Ha-ha.
Normally this would be the end of my story but once in the parking lot we noticed our two motorcycles had multiplied into four and a new story begins.
We as I was saying it was a little cold that day so we were unpacking our bags to get our warm gear on and this guy came out of the shack and walked over to us. He started tell us a story of how he and his buddy had just ridden from Daytona to eat at the shack, here comes the cool part, he reaches into his saddle bag and pulls out the book “Diners, Drive-in’s and Dives”
and starts telling me how he plans on going around to all the TV shows Dives and writing about them. I could tell he almost fell out when I told him I had been doing the same thing. Ha-ha. Small world.
Well we said our farewell to our new friends and off we went on our 500 mile ride back home, we did catch a ferry
(no not that kind of ferry. Ha-ha) an automotive ferry
about a block from the shack, a perfect ended to a perfect meal. Three cheers for Singleton’s Seafood Shack!!!
I got to say this place gave my # 1 Diner pick "Darwell’s of LongBeach Ms"
DARWELL'S
A run for the money, I give The Shack five stars all the way around, so if you are looking for a place to eat on the water, with great seafood, service, and just a great laid back atmosphere, then Singleton’s Seafood Shack is the place for you!!! Tell them Big Al sent you…they want have a clue who I am…but tell them anyway. Ha-ha.
Till next time
Big Al
