Long weekend

OK, so it's almost Friday again (I love the four-day holiday). But let me give a quick update of my Independence Day weekend.
I met Abbey at a huge house she was babysitting at on Friday night in NJ. The kids she watches have every toy, book, movie, game you can imagine. Including a big in-ground pool. I'm jealous. From there, we drove back to her apartment to make cupcakes, deviled eggs and pasta salad before going to bed. We woke up early to go "down the shore." That's how you say it supposedly. Omit the "to" and the "the." We stopped at Costco and bought a crazy amount of food: about 70 hamburgers, 50 hotdogs, three types of salads, a huge veggie tray, strawberries, and bags and bags of chips. Abbey still worried that we wouldn't have enough to eat. Don't worry. We did.
After laying out at the beach, where I got ridiculously burned on my back, we had a party at the house. There were supposed to be fireworks on Sunday. But a huge thunderstorm rolled in that night. It was really just as amusing. We all watched from the front porch as some of our drunken neighbors danced around in the flooded streets or on the tops of their roofs. The lightening struck so close in those scary bright lines that kind of make your heart jump, and it was all over in about a half hour. We went to a local bar later on, where I pretended to talk in Kory's huge 1993 Motorola, handing it off to random people and telling them that Zack Morris was on the other line.
We went to Bar A on Monday night, which is a different type of bar. Everything is outside, except for a room with a live band. There's a sand volleyball court with lounge chairs and tiki huts and all kind of cute beachy stuff. Although my favorite part of the night came after the bar, when Abbey, Rachel, Jim and I walked to a pizza place. We ordered cheese fries, which came with a free surprise -- a dead fly on the bottom of the plate. A second or two after we had our girly shrieking over with, Jim casually reached in and swooped the fly into his mouth. Which of course, caused an even greater amount of shrieking. Gross, but kind of impressive considering we hadn't even dared him. I definitely don't want to eat there again, though.
Abbey and I drove back to Saddle Brook on Tuesday morning and we saw "The Devil Wears Prada" for free thanks to a special she gets from the cable and internet company. And then we ate at one of her favorite Mexican restaurants. Yum.
Surprisingly, traffic on the drive home was light. Go figure. But I was still completely exhausted by the time I got back to my apartment.
Time off can be tiring. In a good way.