Vacation in my own backyard.

     Well, my vacation is over and everything went pretty much as planned. We checked into the Hard Rock Hotel on Sunday night and stayed out in the casino until day break.

     On Monday, we had an early breakfast and then headed out to the beautiful pool for some fun in the sun. You can't really tell from the photo how beautiful the 4 acre pool area is.

      The mountain that you see in the middle of the pool has a really cool waterslide down it and a swim up Tiki Bar at the bottom complete with lots of little table areas hidden away in all of the caves and crevices. There is a very large area of powder white sand lined with beautiful beach chairs with white covers and yellow towels, it's practically a theme park like setting.

     We did have one unplanned incident on Monday at the pool. Mary Lou hit her head (really hard) coming down the water slide and the nice people at the Hard Rock insisted that I drive her to the emergency room to make sure that she didn't have a concussion.

      It's amazing how businesslike accidents have become, everyone is so focused on having to do everything that they can to make sure that they don't get sued.

     Anyway she did get a quick check up and they said that she would be fine. Besides a head ache and a stiff neck I guess she is, thank God.

     After the emergency room detour we headed to the board walk on Hollywood Beach. As you can see from the photo below there are not actually any boards on this particular boardwalk but it is a closed off strip of beach lined with some of the cutest little shops and what's gotta be the worlds best pizza. Mmmm ...

     I call this photo bartering, don't ask because you wouldn't even want to know. Just trust me when I say sometimes my friend can be an absolute trip.

     There was a small outdoor theater on the beach, we noticed that there would be a show playing at 7:30 so we hung around to see what it would be. It ended up being a swing dance band. The crowd started shuffling in before showtime and the smell of Brute and Oldspice began to overcome the smell of Banana Boat and Hawaiian Tropic LOL. You can tell from the photo that it was an over 60 crowd and oh how they loved to dance.

     The real party was going on behind the theater, we could defiantly tell we were not in Boca. Hollywood Beach is a very old area and spending the day there had a very Bahamian feel to it.  You could tell that the locals were defiantly living on island time (it was great). It would have been very easy to get caught up in the culture if not for the fact that we had to be to work at 3:00 on Tuesday.

     The culture and the people were not the same as on our beach just 30 or 40 miles away but the beautiful surf and sand were very familiar even the sea gulls were there.

     The Party continued Tuesday morning in Pompano and then we headed off to work and met again on Wednesday night for the Singing in the Rain musical, it was the best part of the whole week.

     First we had dinner in the Hard Rock Cafe. The food was good, the decor was great and the staff was a lot of fun standing on the furniture to do their dance routines to some of the songs that would play.

     The musical was beautiful, the props that they used were absolutely amazing. Tim Faulter played Don Lockwood, he was really cute and was an amazing dancer, he's no Artsy Albert or anything but he did do a good job. (I love Albert)

     For anyone not familiar with Singing in the Rain, the story line is from 1932 and is about the transition in Hollywood from silent movies to talkies, it was a very funny show.

 

     The props for the actual Singing in the Rain number were awesome. There was real rain up on that stage ( it was so cool). All of the performers were great especially Tim Falter, I don't know that Gene Kelly him self could have done it any better.

     I would highly recommend seeing this if you ever get the chance, but then again I love most any live performance.

                                *** Coy ***