St Pete's beach...a little further than remembered..

Some of you may remember that for my birthday Jody took me for a long weekend at the beach in St Petes in Florida. In my head I remembered it as at most a 1 hour 45min journey....hmm the age must be addling my brain as it took us nearly three to get there when little Issie decided she wanted to go back to the beach...

The weather was overcast, but very warm, but the weathermen had said

gulfside would have the best chance of sun, so after a quick trip for cigarettes for Anne and a bag of sandcastle buckets for Issie and we were on our way...

Issie had Anne's Itouch loaded with Sponge Bob and Mickey Mouse and she looked very happy in the back. Anne and I were putting the world to rights in the front.

2 hours in to the journey and we still had not reached Tampa...hold on something is wrong here...get the sat nav out!

Still 50 mins to our destination Issie was now starving and the only way to placate her was by playing Eye Spy...I don't know how I kept losing, but the journey soon was over.

We lied our way into a hotel carpark, so as not to pay (naughty I know, but come on $15 for 2 hours!!) and we were soon ensconced in the beach bar having lunch and a couple of cocktails! Lunch over it was time to build!!

Ok so you can see the weather was slightly worse than in September above, however it was still warm enough to play on the beach and Issie and I duly started building a sandcastle. We would like to claim that it was all our hard work, but we'd found the big holes already had been dug.

We had fun adding castle towers, feather and shells. Multiple people stopped to admire our efforts ...we didn't tell them we hadn't done it all ourselves! Small ones have short attention spans and Iss was soon off playing in the surf. After getting sand in everyone of my nook and crannys the other day I wanted to stay out of the water....hmmm what could I do..

I know I'd imortalise Anne in sand...Anne look, I've built you out sand....she looked on in horror...I've got no hair.!!! This beach is cleaned everday so available detritus consisted of seaweed or seaweed...Anne, we've found you some hair!!!A great likeness I'm sure you'll agree!

Weirdly it took 1 hour 40 mins to get home, don't ask me how, I think we were caught in some weird time warp on the way there!