Originally published on 11 January 2008. This is part of a series of e-mails from my graduation trip to the Bahamas and Florida with my friend Terri!

Hello all! The last day of Terri’s and my graduation trip adventure was nothing short of fabulous. This is how we spent our day at Hollywood Beach, Florida!

After breakfast at the hotel, we took the complementary shuttle to the airport to check our luggage about 10:30, only to find out that we couldn’t check it more than four hours previous to our flight–which didn’t leave until 8:20 pm. Remember that for your own flights! The luggage checker said there’s a room where we could leave our luggage to be watched for $5 per bag, but it closes at 5:30. That was our best bet, though, so we checked our luggage in there (and rearranged a few things because our bags were too heavy), then started on our way to Hollywood Beach!

The bus drivers and other people around were nice and very helpful, but Terri and I both decided public transportation in the US is pretty inefficient, especially compared to the rudimentary system in the Bahamas that worked so well! Lots of hurry up and wait was involved, and the timetables weren’t always accurate. Oh well. We still got where we were going!

Once at the beach, we walked along the boardwalk taking pictures and looking for somewhere to eat lunch. We’d heard about a fantastic sushi place on the beach called Sushi-Thai, but when we found it, they said the sushi chef didn’t come until 1:30–it was around 12:15 when we got to the restaurant. So, we decided the best thing to do would be lay around the beach for an hour!

I finished my book and Terri read quite a bit in hers, we took lots more pictures, and we got a little burned! We’d done fairly well the whole time in the Bahamas, but we were definitely burned that day! But lots of people would love to be sunbured in January right? We thought about getting in the water, but after just sticking our feet in we decided it was way too cold!

We ended up staying out there till about 2:00 and made our way over to Sushi-Thai. Terri got chicken terriyaki (and liked it!), and I got my sushi fix for a while–a rainbow roll and one piece each of yellowtail (my favorite), mussel, and conch nigiri sushi. It was amazing!

After that, we walked around to look in some of the shops and stopped in a jewelry store just to see what they had. The thing that most impressed me was a very VERY rare pearl–a pink one from a conch shell worth $12,000!

By that time we needed to make our way back to the airport. After lots more hurry up and wait, changing buses, etc., we made it to the luggage check place at 5:25, with just 5 minutes to spare before closing time! Whew! We definitely got our money’s worth for the day with that. We checked our luggage for the plane, got through security, found a place to sit, and waited around in the airport until time to load up. Our plane change in Atlanta was timed just right, and we were home in Nashville by 10:30pm!

So that was our adventure! How would you spend just one day at the beach?