Happy New Year - I'm off to the beach

It's New Year's Eve and we're off to the beach....

Not this one. This is a beach near Obidos in Portugal on the west coast, far from the Algarve that was turned into another Costa long ago by loud tattooed Brits.

The best places, inevitably are those that few people have discovered in the same way as the best restaurants are those frequented by the locals that look from the outside like the sort of joints you would take your dog to be put down.

New Year's Eves can be like that too. The big venues seldom fail to disappoint, unless you like freezing half to death for hours for the honor of having beer tipped over your head, in Time Square or Tralfalgar Square or Edinburgh's Tron.

In saying that the low key New Years have disappointed too. As a teenager growing up in suburbia there was such a crush of expectation placed on one night, that New Years inevitably proved to be damp squibs.

They'd often end up in cold bowling alleys, exchanging germs with a nefarious and frightening looking girl from the local comprehensive school, who you'd jump in an icy river to avoid making eye contact with the next week.

A bad New Year's Eve was failing to exchange germs with  a nefarious and frightening looking girl from the local comprehensive school, and having to watch your friend in the aforementioned germ exchange.

Actually a bad New Year's Eve was walking for hours in a sullen huddle with a group of no hopers looking for a non existent party and ending up back at the home of one of these no hopers polishing off a bottle of Thunderbird.

Of course, we are more evolved now. We have also recognized that New Year's Eves can be what's technically referred to as a pile of old cat poo.

But tonight we are free of the kids and out partying at the beach down at the Outer Banks. It should be enjoyable in a 40-something, semi-responsible, almost grown-up kind of way.

Happy New Year to all my fantastic blog friends. Here's to 2011.