what is the word

On Friday Morgan & Sheri & I drove out to Rockaway Beach, because the nite before we polished off too many beers at their house & we all pinkie-swore to call in sick the next day. I slept on their pull-out couch in the living room & the next morning we all called out one by one. When we finally got our act together around noon, it was much too late to go to Montauk, as we'd envisioned the nite before, so we decided to make it Rockaway instead. It didn’t take all that long to get there by car, despite a few failed attempts at finding the boardwalk & the crossing & re-crossing of a certain bridge more than once.
Finally we saw the long wooden walk against the sand & we parked the car across the street from a big painted whale. There was a lot of litter by the boardwalk & some parts of the sand were covered with snow, but it was quite pretty & barren nevertheless. We walked down to where the surf was coming in & looked out at the waves & at the stretches of empty beach on either side. Sheri wondered how long it would take a person to freeze to death in the water & Morgan guessed not more than a minute or two. I picked up a couple of large shells but they were frozen, dripping & packed with hard sand. Morgan & Sheri in their twin black puffy jackets with furry hoods were taking photographs & making obscene sand sculptures, respectively. We probably would have looked pretty funny out there all bundled up trying to be beachy but no one was around to notice.
About five or ten minutes on the beach was enough. We climbed back up the sand & made it to the warm car, which carried us to a quaint local bar with a soap-opera-watching proprietress, very cheap Budweisers, & a vending machine full of scratch-off tickets that none of us won.
When I got home I had an email that said, "Rock-rock-rockaway Beach? Damn, u must be pretty tuff..." Eh, not really. I mean, yeah, it was cold out there, but we really did it for the cheap Buds. Something about forcing yourself out into the bracing weather & back again makes you feel you've accomplished something. & once you've accomplished something, well, drinking beers in the afternoon is not only OK, it's practically your duty.