Beach, Bells and Bagpipes

So this past weekend, two of our friends got married in Pensacola, Florida. 

Two other friends of ours were nice enough to welcome us all to their family's beach house in Destin for the Friday before the wedding.  We of course accepted with no pause and Friday morning we awoke and were on the road by 8 am on our way to Destin.  For some reason our GPS decided to take us the longest way possible, but nothing could ruin the day.  The weather was perfect, which I unfortunately did not prepare for, so we had to run over to a super cheesy beach shop to pick up a $10 Destin outfit.  Everyone else started arriving shortly after so we all went for a walk along the beach and just hung out on the back deck.

For dinner that night we stopped by a really good seafood restaurant called Harbor Docks.  If you're in town for a visit, you should definitely stop by there.  They had a bunch of daily catches that could be made a few different ways and a long list of sushi. I went for the sushi, and it was really delicious and super fresh.  The rest of the night we spent back at the beach house drinking wine and just chatting away.  Saturday morning we all got up and went for brunch at a local place called The Pancakery.  This is another good choice if you're in town, but be forewarned that there will be a long wait on the weekends.  We waited for about 35 minutes but the wait was worth it.  They have any kind of pancake you could think of, different types of batters and a very long list of toppings to choose from - even M&Ms if you wanted.  After brunch we went back to watch some football and then had to move on to Pensacola for the wedding.  The wedding was lovely.  They got married in a small, historic church in downtown Pensacola and then the reception immediately followed at a restaurant on the water.  Everything went well with the wedding with just one little hitch - unfortunately someone locked the church doors so the bride couldn't come in when it was time.  Finally someone realized and ran to unlock the doors for her.  Other than one little delay, everything else seemed to go smoothly and we all had a blast.

After the wedding our group decided to check out a local pub we had been talking about all weekend long.  So one thing you should know about my friends and I, we are all in our early 30s but sometimes I think if someone listened in on our conversations they would think we were a bunch of 80 year olds.  So Friday night when D and I were laying in bed watching TV we were flipping through the channels and saw a local commercial talking about the $0.18 soup at the pub that is the same price as when the pub opened its doors in 1977.  We thought we had to have misheard that but of course we had to tell everyone about it the next morning so we literally brought up the $0.18 soup about 30 times during the day so after the wedding we had to stop by to check it out.  So we walked over from our hotel to McGuires Irish Pub and bellied up to the bar where we ordered some drinks and a bowl of the $0.18 soup.  It was delish! We had an interesting time at this Irish pub.  First off one of my friends decided to share some steak with a group of random guys who were sitting behind us.  Then as we were getting ready to leave a nice man walked in and started playing his bagpipes.  All in all it was an interesting evening.  Sunday morning we basically woke up and had a 6 hour drive back home so the day was spent mostly with sitting in the car unfortunately.