Ocean Beach Cafe, Bar and Bistro | Restaurant Review

We love going to the beach! The kids love being in the water, they love the sand, and we have basically made it so we can pack up for the beach and unpack afterwards in under and hour. This includes making lunch, packing up all our towels and beach toys, and getting water shoes on! Now that restaurants are back open, we figured we’d try some out near Shoeburryness, our favourite beach of choice. Our first adventure was to the Ocean Beach cafe, bar and bistro.

Provencal Meatballs, Parrilla Chorizo and Cajun Crab Croquettes

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Creating a feature wall with My-Picture.co.uk

[Ad- gifted product] Feature walls are something that I think brings a lot of character to your home, without having to paint a wall and do all of the different updating that can happen when you are painting. As Dann and I have moved into a new house, the first house we have moved into together, I really wanted to be apart of the decorating of the house – and along with themes in the children’s rooms, I wanted to do something super fun and meaningful in our room and in the living room. That’s why we started talking about a picture-focused feature wall.

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A Day Out at Boom Battle Bar Lakeside

[Ad- gifted experience] I got the chance to go along to the new Boom Battle Bar at Lakeside as apart of their press day. The self-titled ‘Adventure Bar’ chain is an interesting twist on pubs, as if bars had gone down a different path than ‘more taps’ and instead focused on the pub games. Cribbage and horseshoes are out though, and while darts remain it does so with a twist and is joined by axe throwing, nail hammering and fun-fair style physical games.

Where I’m from we have a lot of pubs, there’s probably a pub for every 3k people in the town, and it’s a big town. We also have clubs, chain bars, and you can drink at the restaurants too. When you walk into most of the pubs though, be that your King’s Head, Red Lion or White Hart, they’re all pretty similar. Lots of tables and low seating, a row of stools at the bar, a tv in each room. A lot of these places feel tired (and tend to be filled with the retired) and certainly don’t feel welcoming – it feels like it’s uncommon for places to gain ‘regulars’ based on proximity, more so on association. Boom Battle Bar in Lakeside feels like a response to that, an attempt to try and make an actual destination that does a lot of things that pubs used to do decades ago; to be a place to entertain, meet up, play a few games and relax.

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Finding the Perfect Gifts with IWOOT

[Ad- gifted product] When it comes to choosing the perfect gift, it can always be a challenge. There are so many different gifts out there and everyone seems to have different hobbies and things that they enjoy. We tasked ourselves with finding gifts for our entire family, using IWOOT – a gift shop that has lots and lots of different gifts for any occasion. We wanted to make sure that everyone in our household of five was able to have a gift that they enjoyed, with some bonuses thrown in. There was so much to choose from on the site, it did take a while for us to settle on the items we did!

Build Your Own Pinball Machine

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Flying from the UK to the US during Covid-19 (Amber Country)

Recently, right before UK freedom day, I was able to fly from the United Kingdom to the United States. I am an America Citizen and had been traveling home to visit my family, who I haven’t seen for years. When it came to traveling, I found that during COVID rules, everything is really confusing, hard to follow, and jumping around, and I really just wanted to hear from someone who had made the trip, to know what to expect, instead of reading endless government websites. So, I decided to write my experience up.

Couple of key points: This is my experience from my point of view. There is probably other (and maybe even better) ways to travel during COVID. The Government does not recommend travel for leisure yet, to Amber countries, so do consider if you really need to travel. Restrictions are always changing and adjusting, this is based of of me traveling a few days before Freedom day, but at the time of posting, there isn’t many changes to anything. There are different rules per state. I flew from the UK into Boston, with a layover in Iceland, and then drove to New York. I am a US Citizen. I flew via Icelandair.

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