BEACH!!
We all had one last weekend before leaving training and scattering to the uttermost parts of the earth, so what better way to spend the time than to hit the beach?
We all grouped up and carpooled down on Friday afternoon. After talking about it a lot, I got my first exposure to culture shock just going to the beach. 
To be fair, we had been living in our own little bubble. We slept, ate, learned, and played all on this one secluded campus, with an occasional trip to WalMart to break up the monotony. It was quite a jolt just to head down to the beach and see the people and the bars and all along the strip.
After getting in, we ate and checked into our hotel room. When I say "our", I mean the 18 people that had come down Friday night. The guys wisely found another room to stay in, so it was 9 guys in one room, 9 girls in the other. It was a little squished, but at least we saved our honor.
It was a good weekend. We spent Friday night and Saturday morning at the beach, then hit the tourist traps Saturday afternoon.
Body Surfing!!
We also played some beach volleyball and beach soccer, but all those pics have people's faces in them, so they'll stay in the vault.
Friday night ended with an exciting trip to "Waffles 'N Things" (Whatever happened to Waffle House?) and a restful night's sleep on the floor.
Saturday we all hit the beach again, then split up to hit the town. I'm pretty cheap (actually, I'm very cheap) so I just window-shopped. It was your run-of-the-mill beach tourist shops, but there were some pretty good wares for sale.
We all headed back to the beach before leaving Saturday evening. In what would prove to be a bad decision, I decided to run along the beach for a while. It was going pretty well, I was having fun. I ended up running along the coast guard truck tracks so the sand wouldn't give way so bad. I was running right along having a merry old time when the sky started turning black. I was running away from the storm, but I was also running away from the people I knew. So, I turned around and ran into the eye of the storm.
I felt pretty brave and cool and manly as I ran through the rain, running straight toward the storm. That didn't last long, though. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but I felt hail coming down. (Does it hail at the beach?) It was either hail or hard raindrops and I'm not as manly as I thought =). Anyway, once the boulder-sized hail started coming down, I turned aside into the Holiday Inn.
There I was with no cell phone, no way to find anybody I knew, no shoes for crying out loud. God worked it out, though, and I found a couple of girls I knew in the lobby. They had just popped in to use the bathroom, so it was cool we ran into each other.
Well, from there we crammed back into the cars, made a quick stop at Chik-Fil-A (not quite Waffle House, but it'll do), and headed home.
Thus ended the great American Beach Adventure of 2006.
