Aaaah, Beach Time

I may live in land locked Pennsylvania, but I am a beach bum at heart.  I have always been overwhelmed by the beauty and power of the ocean.  No alarm needs to be set for me to hit the beach pre-dawn and sit in the cool sand and watch the sunrise.  On island stays, I love getting to experience both sunrise and sunset over the ocean.  For me, this is the perfect start and end to a day.

Where I grew up, Ocean City, MD and Rehoboth, DE were the closest beaches.  When my parents took us as kids to the ocean, it was a time of magic.  We stayed for many years at a cottage in Rehoboth on the bay side and I learned to crab off the dock in the backyard.  Catching dinner was great fun, and it gave the folks a break.  If that dock hadn’t been there, my poor parents would have been on the beach for 12 hours a day.

My beach experiences as a child shaped the way I like to spend time on the beach today.  My father used to have my sister and I swim out past the breakers, to where the water was calmer, but deep.  Swimming up and down the shore line, without having to fight the waves, was glorious.  Also, I was convinced, if I stayed out there long enough, mermaids would come and get me and I could be one of them and live under the sea forever.  Then, as an adult, I found Carolina beaches.

The gentle surf and soft sand are winners!  These are great beaches, where beach combing will turn up mostly small shells, but often a shark’s tooth or two.  Beach combing is one of those activities that is almost an obsession with me.  The beaches are live too.  It’s easy to find starfish, hermit crabs, conchs and sand dollars.  When it was my turn to be the parent, many mothers gave me the stink eye because while they were reading a book and watching over the kids in the shallows, I was in the shallows finding live sea creatures and showing them to my children.  When their children saw this, they wanted Mom up out of the chair and hunting for these creatures too.  Hence, the stink eye.

Carolina beaches are also awesome for sand castles.  The drippy sand kind that you squeeze out through your fist as you build tower after tower.  My kids are now adults, and if we hit Hilton Head together, I can guarantee there will be at least one sand castle during the trip.

But my all-time favorite thing to do at the beach has to be done further south.  In the Keys or in the Caribbean, where the water is crystal clear.  Snorkeling rocks!  I can spend hours looking at the ocean floor or at coral or at the rocks under water and watching the fish and other creatures that live under the surface.  More than once I have stayed out too long, and suddenly realized that I was exhausted, that it was time to hit the sand before I got in real trouble.  My goal is to one day see a sea turtle, but I have seen a pretty serious eel, a great rock fish and uncountable beautifully colored tropical fish.

In another life, I would have been a pearl diver or a marine biologist.  Watching those foreign creatures, just steps from my domain of terra firma is a thrill.  When I have the opportunity to visit a beach, make up, shopping, practically eating, are unnecessary.  I really love getting lost in the experiences of the beach itself.

When you travel, where do you like to lose yourself?