Panama City Beach -

Before telling you about our ride down to Panama City Beach and the Thunder Beach rally, I need to bring you up to date on our evening in Nashville. After publishing the last post, jr and I took the shuttle bus to downtown Nashville for dinner and to checkout the “Nashville Scene.” Broadway is the main drag. There are wall-to-wall bars, restaurants and T-shirt shops on Broadway and a couple of side streets. We found restaurant with decent food and not-to-exorbitant prices. We were able to sit on the street-side patio and enjoy the evening breeze.

Most of the bars have bands for entertainment. If you don’t like what you hear in one bar you can go to another and another until you find what you like. It was a Tuesday night, so none of the places we visited had a cover charge. We like the band in this place. The fiddle player was pretty good.

It rained while we were in this place, so we stayed a little longer.

Wednesday we rode down to Panama City Beach and another Wyndam Resorts condo. We got caught in a shower about 45 miles from the beach and were dry be the time we arrived. This is the view from the 14th-floor room.

Before we could get our parking passes, jr was asked if he wanted free breakfasts and lunches and a complimentary $75 American Express card. The catch was he had to listen to a 90 minute spiel on new properties available. jr said, “No” over and over. The rep was nasty and persistent. It took about 20 minutes for the rep to give up and write the passes. I can imagine it would be impossible to get out of his talk without spending thousands and thousands of dollars.

After dropping our stuff in the room we walked across the street to a pizza and wings shop. I had the grilled chicken salad – probably the healthiest thing on the menu.

Today we did almost nothing. We watched the ocean and went to the Harley dealer. This is Thunder Beach Bike Week, so there are plenty of motorcycle enthusiasts and vendors in town. jr is collecting one Harley poker chip per state. He went on to the tent vendors and I returned to the room with a brief relapse of the illness I had earlier in the week. After a nap I’m fully recovered.