When we go to the beach, we have a pretty set routine…we get up around 8, grab a quick bite to eat and start applying sunscreen. Once properly lathered and slathered, we grab another bite to eat and head for the beach (with our coolers full of food). Beach tents have evolved and we have moved along with them. We carry our tent down and set it up (and maybe grab a bit of beef jerky or some peanuts) and head for the water. My immediate family body- surfs until noon at which time we grab a bite to eat and then back at it.

I sort of love the beach because we basically have no rules. For breakfast and lunch, Chips-Ahoy cookies are perfectly acceptable as the main course or as a side item. I drink pop by the two liter and am rarely caught without a handful of some sort of food that is ruining my bikini body. But it’s the beach you see so all rules are pretty much out the window.

So after a day full of eating at the house, we always go to some fancy (or at least expensive) seafood place where we eat far too much (and far too rich) fresh seafood. One place that is a ton of fun at Tybee Island is called the Crab Shack. The Crab Shack is certainly not a fancy place but it is expensive. It’s sort of hard to imagine why the prices are so high since all of the dining is either outside under the trees or inside a shack. By shack I don’t mean a quaint little restaurant building…I mean a shack. Cats crawl all over the place grabbing the bits of seafood that people drop and birds occasionally swoop in to snatch a piece of low country boil of a runaway shrimp.

In spite of its humble appearance, the food is really great. They specialize in “low country” food like low country boil, shrimp on grits, shrimp a-la-mode (channeling Bubba from Forest Gump here), etc. Everything is brought on a paper plate and the tables have holes cut in the middle where diners throw everything when finished. We eat everything with our fingers and garner the biggest smiles from the kids you can imagine!

Anyhow, an additional draw of the place is the alligator lagoon where a few dozen alligators reside. For $3, one can purchase 4 soft dogfood-like morsels to hang on the end of a bamboo pole to feed the gators. It is a blast although it appears that the gators eat well as they sometimes don’t want to play along with the “gator fishermen”. I suppose a cat might fall in here and there to satiate them, but generally, I think every patron must be feeding the gators ’til they are full. We were lucky to find a gator that put on a good show for the kids and ate everything we sent his way…must have been the runt of the group I guess.

Anyhow, we eat way too much every year and I generally gain 5-10 pounds in a week. It’s worth every calorie though as fresh seafood is hard to beat!