guest post #3: driving on the boardwalk at the beach

this guest post is from my favorite sister, jenna! and i stole the photo from another website - please don't sue me, people. also, check out jenna's blog, observations from a wallflower, at jennamissboyd.blogspot.com. 

This Saturday night, I went with Cara, Mikey, and Chase to look at the holiday lights on the Virginia Beach Oceanfront. They actually close down the boardwalk at the beach in order for cars to drive on it, which, I'll admit, is a pretty cool concept. When we got there, we saw signs that read, "Holiday Lights <---," but those just led to empty parking lots and buildings. We used our problem-solving skills and decided to follow the cars in front of us instead. This worked well at first and even got us to the line of cars that was ready to go onto the boardwalk. However, there was a guy who was directing traffic with one of those light sticks and he waved the car in front of us forward, instead of having them turn right as everyone else was doing. He kept waving us in the same direction, so I continued following the car in front of us and this caused us to lose our place in line. We were all pretty saddened by his lack of ability to wave a glow stick, but decided to persevere and return to the line. We waited another 5-10 minutes, I told everyone that I was going to turn right, no matter what direction he waved, and we made it successfully to the ticket booth. Once there, Mikey and Cara pooled their money to give the girl $5 to get onto the boardwalk ($10 cheaper than usual because it's opening weekend). We were handed a coupon book and a CD to listen to during our holiday light experience.

The lights were divided into various themes and the first theme was dinosaurs. I think we came to the consensus that they must have gone to a bargain discount store for them. That was the only way to make sense of a half-mile of dinosaur lights during the holidays. The next theme was sea animals, which made a lot more sense because it's the oceanfront and they like to shamelessly plug the Virginia Beach Aquarium down the street. Then there were random things to represent various holidays such as, Santa stuck in the chimney, maybe a manger scene, and, my personal favorite, the Grim Reaper hanging out the window of a Monster Truck. My favorite quote of the night was Cara saying, "Look! A ladle!" None of us knew why she cared about seeing a large spoon until we saw the "dreidel" and laughed at her.

The last theme was the "12 Days of Christmas," so we turned down the "McDonald's Holiday Lights at the Beach, Presented by nTelos Wireless" CD and sang the song at the top of our lungs as we passed each one. My favorite for that one was "10 Lords-A-Leaping" because they really had 1 Lord-A-Leaping, but they had him hop to 10 different places. I guess they wanted to save on electricity.

Overall, I thought it was pretty cool to drive on the boardwalk and we saw Christmas lights, so there's not much more to ask for.