A Three Day Weekend on One Good Leg

A friend left a voicemail Friday afternoon saying he couldn't remember if we were away for the long weekend or not, which made me laugh out loud. I listened to it while my broken ankle was wrapped in an ice pack and Beverly Hills 90210  reruns played in the background, because I am still trapped in the confines of an orthopedic boot. The closest we were coming to any holiday weekend adventures was couch surfing. (In the spirit of full disclosure, it's not like I would have been out hiking or rollerblading even if my bones were whole; still, when I'm healthy, I'm quite good at lounging on a beach or by a pool).

Determined to make the best of the situation, we kicked off our three day weekend with a most all-American feast at our favorite local hot dog spot: JJ's Red Hots. For some reason, the neighborhood had a power outage right around dinnertime, and when we pulled into JJ's parking lot, the lights were back on but the sign on the door said they were closed. We were devastated but determined, and an employee reassured us that if we could wait a few minutes, they would indeed reopen their kitchen and churn out some deliciousness for us to enjoy. About twenty minutes later, we were in hot dog heaven and it was well worth the wait.

Hot dogs and cheese fries (you know, for the calcium).

Saturday, to our lazy person credit, we did laundry and a few other odds and ends around the house, started watching a new show (Killing Eve) which turned out not to be terrible, and then cleaned ourselves up and ventured out. We have a habit of staying within a five-mile radius of our house for most of our outings, but it was a holiday weekend and we were staycationing, so I decided that a trip up to Lake Norman to try the much talked about restaurant Hello Sailor was in order. I'm so glad we did!

Hello Sailor is the revamped version of the old Rusty Rudder fish camp that used to be in the same spot, right on the lake in Cornelius. It has an updated, Palm Springs kind of vibe and the food is worth all the rave reviews it has received. They even have a cute little tiki bar area outside to have a cocktail and watch the boats dock.

Hello Sailor and hello, delicious.

The tiki bar promises "smooth sailing."

We took a seat by the water and ordered up two of their signature cocktails. I had a fizzy pineapple concoction and Clint chose a watermelon libation. His was the best, by far, but we shared and sipped until the heat and my good ol' boot got the better of us. We headed inside to the air-conditioned dining room for our meal.

Lakeside with boat drinks. Not a bad place to be.

Last May, Garden & Gun magazine called Hello Sailor's hush puppies the best in the South: high praise indeed coming from one of the Bibles of the Southern lifestyle. We knew right away we had to try them, and they were fantastically light and airy. We also ordered a dozen raw oysters on the half shell, half East coast and half West coast. Hello Sailor serves these with Biggie and Tupac markers, a rapper from each coast to keep those oysters trendy. (Hard-learned lesson: when the menu reads "market price," it is always wise to ask what the current market price is...I won't go into detail, but our oysters should have come with diamond encrusted cocktail spoons. Yikes.)

East coast vs. West coast, oyster edition.

He ran out of Saltines so he just sucked that last oyster down straight.

We also split their fried shrimp and fish platter, and I'm still thinking about those shrimp. They were addictive, and part of the reason we are already recruiting friends to go back with us for another visit.

A platter of delicious fried everything.

Absolutely stuffed, we headed back to south Charlotte, got into our pajamas, and rented quite possibly one of the most mindlessly stupid movies I have ever attempted to watch: Happy Death Day 2U, the less-than-highly anticipated sequel to Happy Death Day. I shouldn't even confess that we watched it, but if you are looking for a movie to make Hot Tub Time Machine seem like an Academy Award winner, you might want to check it out. Well, at least our dinner experience was a great one.

We slept in Sunday morning and shunned the sweltering 90-degree heat in favor of watching old Duck Dynasty reruns from the couch. When Clint gets bored, he tends to futz in the kitchen, so our idle morning resulted in a batch of "Clint's Magical Ceviche" for lunch. I have offered on many occasions to go out to a nice restaurant for ceviche, but apparently this dish tastes best when you spend at least half a day chopping, dicing, mixing, and laboring. What do I know?

Clint's self-proclaimed "magical" ceviche. He's nothing if not humble.

Our lunch was followed by a dutiful and necessary trip to Walmart to pick up our online grocery order. Mercifully, we did not need to venture inside the store, so we were home in no time, restocked with all the essentials for grilling out on Memorial Day and with the remainder of the afternoon left for the broken ankle entertainment trinity: Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Hulu. Young, wild, and free, y'all. We may or may not have also made ourselves a pitcher of palomas to get the Walmart taste out of our mouths. Continuing our theme of terrible movies, we watched The Meg, the Jason Statham shark movie about man versus megaladon. Sure it was cheesy and the special effects were terrible, but it is a summer shark movie, so we felt obligated to watch. It was free with our left-over-from-Game-of-Thrones HBO trial subscription, and I really feel like we got our money's worth.

Getting back on track after an afternoon of errands.

Our Memorial Day plans, minimal as they were, change drastically once we realized the entire state of North Carolina was one big open flame. We had planned a cookout, but as the time approached to get the grill going and the thermometer still read 92 degrees, we improvised and got out the next best thing: the George Foreman grill. Lean, mean, grilling machine and air conditioning? Hard to beat.

This still counts as grilling in my book. 

We finished up our evening with our tasty burgers and some more streaming shows. I'm headed back to the orthopedist this afternoon, with high hopes of being emancipated from the shackles of this boot. After all, this was the unofficial start of the season, and we've already done an exceptional job of putting the lazy in lazy days of summer.