Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you

Well, after days on end of searingly hot weather, Florida obviously realised we were headed to the beach today, so it choose to dump more rain than was really necessary on us. All day.

We have some previous form with this. Last time Terry and I were in Florida, we decided to go to Cocoa Beach. It was to have been Terry’s first view of the Atlantic from this side of the pond, but note the past tense, here: Terry wanted to see Cocoa, but Cocoa obviously didn’t want to see Terry, so it rained so hard we couldn’t even see the beach, never mind get on it. “Never mind!” we thought. “One day we will come back to Florida, and we will come back to the beach!” That day was to have been today. Again, note the past tense. It looks like the beaches here have something against Terry, because we visited two but only actually laid eyes on one – and that one was only seen during a brief break in the storm.

The first beach was St. Augustine. My parents had been there last year, and had spent the intervening twelve months telling us how great it was, so naturally, as soon as we drove into the city limits, the storm clouds started gathering. Luckily we had enough dry time to take a walk around the historic district, and the trip was worthwhile just for that: St. Augustine looks like a little slice of Spain that’s been dropped down in the USA. I mean, it even has a castle. It’s so pretty and quaint, and also: has a LOT of chocolate stores.

We had a great time wandering around and… well, eating, really… then the storm broke. “No problem!” we said, like the fools we so obviously are. “We will jump back in the car and drive to Daytona! We will take the weather with us!” Well, OK, we didn’t actually say that last bit, but we may as well have, because when we got to Daytona, guess what was there too?! Did you guess, “the storm”? Go to the top of the class! Undeterred, we drove down onto the beach and posed like Playboy Bunnies with the car:

Note: not actually like Playboy Bunnies. I just said that to see what kind of crazy ass Google hits it gets me.

Despite the weather, it was actually lots of fun at the beach. Moments after this picture was taken, for instance, my parents and Terry all started waving and gesticulating like crazy at me, making me rush screaming out of the water convinced that a shark was after me. Fun times, folks!

There were no sharks, though. Just a stupid-ass red haired girl posing in the water. Posing , and celebrating the fact that, until today, she’d been walking around with hideous looking red weals under both of her eyes for over a week, meaning that she couldn’t take her sunglasses off AT ALL, ever. GOD. She is still unable to wear makeup, which sucks much more than you can possibly imagine, but at least she is a weal-free zone.

We had a great day, though, weather aside. I really, really don’t want to go home.