Sandy, warm, washed with waves. Sitting, tanning, lying down. Towels, lotion, sunburn. Is there a perfect place? Crowds, quiet, sun. Is any beach like the movies? Frank, Annette, the whole family. Florida, California, New York. Is a vacation complete? Without it?
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We lived near the beach for years, but very rarely went. It was just a bit too far to walk, but too much of a pain (and expensive) to drive to and find a place to park. There’s also the question of what to do. Neither one of us likes just sitting in the sun, and the water around here is always too cold to tempt me in.
Normally we go to the beach when it’s convenient for something else, or is otherwise visually interesting, and content ourselves with a nice walk or poking around in tidepools. Here’s one we saw pretty regularly because there was a burger van there, which was convenient for work. Swimming there would be a good way to die, though. The current was fierce.
But here’s some more swimmable beaches down on the Jurassic Coast.
This was during a big heat wave and the water might actually have been tempting, but you’d have to fight for it.
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I can’t find a decent image, but some North Carolina beaches, when it’s the cool time of year, with cloudy weather, can be very lovely in a moody way and free from crowds. All kinds of weird and wonderful sea life left behind by the receding tide, too.
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The beaches of Oregon are impressive
12 Best Oregon Beaches | U.S. News Travel (usnews.com)
Enjoyed visiting Bandon with all its rock formations, like Face Rock, which I always found rather strange and haunting - like some ancient God laid there and died, its head poking out of the sea.
And there are several shipwrecks to see along the coast
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Moody as in Edgar Allan Poe?
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Oh is that how you want to play it? Well you watch your copy of Sirens every week.
(We’re accusing each other of liking really femmy movies, right?)
DIFFERENT kind of BEACHES. Well played sir. 
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In New York City, we make regular visits to Rockaway Beach in Queens. It was quite a place.
During our time living in North Carolina, we went to a beachfront campground in the small town of Emerald Isle. That is a popular resort town.
Before I left New York for good, I went to the beach at Sunken Meadow State Park in Long Island where I went swimming in Long Island Sound. I remember that for one major reason - the waterproofing on my Timex Indiglo watch failed and it led to the saltwater destroying my watch. I had to get a new one.
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Funnily enough, that potential meaning was on my mind when writing this.
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My mother grew up on Rockaway Beach. The house she grew up in was one of the ones destroyed when a plane crashed into that part of the city in 2001. I got to see it in the 1980s when we took a “mom takes a trip back home” vacation to New York City.
I remember there was a concrete wall with a little opening that turned a corner for you to get to the beach and that’s where the sand started. My mother told me that was as far as they were allowed to go unsupervised when it came to the beach, but as far as her and other parents were concerned, the rest of the neighborhood was fair game by the time you were 4 or 5.
The 1940s was a different time for sure.
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I once got super burned out at a terrible job at a small recording studio (I could tell so many stories about that place) and all of the employees at the company, which was more than just a recording studio, got together and told the owner that I deserved a paid vacation and I got the first one he ever allowed anyone to have. And probably the first one he ever would allow too for all I know.
I decided I needed to go to the ocean to decompress. The closest ocean spot I could drive to was Myrtle Beach, which is a big craphole town. I stayed in a tent in the state park because it was all I could afford and, aside from my having trouble sleeping in a tent, it was a much nicer experience because the beach was a quick walk from my tent and far less crowded in the camping area of the park. I did give in and stay in a motel on my last night though. I avoided the town mostly. Very run down and filled with drunk college students.
The most memorable part of the trip was seeing two B-2 stealth bombers fly low overhead from the nearby Air Force base over the beach and across the ocean. I can’t explain it, you would have to see it yourself, but those things move through the air in a different way from any other airplane I have ever seen. It’s like the air doesn’t even exist for those planes.
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Yep! I remember all those! The sandy beaches, the log walls sticking up, the sand dunes, the crowds, the tire tracks along the beach!
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I beat you to that joke.
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