02 June 2009

They call this a beach??

Full disclosure: I haven't been to the beach since April 2002. This is a problem. In fact, I can honestly say that this is a HUGE problem. I grew up on the coast of North Carolina, and if I had known then that access to the beach would become such an issue later in my life, I would have spent much less time in that 7th period Chemistry class my senior year in high school, and lot more time frolicking in the waves than I did.

It doesn't help matters that the last beach I visited was in Barbados, where I had a three-bedroom house all to myself situated on a rise above one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen. The house was located in the southern part of the island where the the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea met. The colors were spectacular and I would sit on my veranda in the evenings just watching the turquoise-blue of the Caribbean merge with the blue-gray of the Atlantic. To get to the beach I only had to walk the short path that began at the front garden and in five minutes I was relaxing on a fairly empty and gorgeous sandy beach. In short, it was the polar opposite of this:

A beach somewhere in Spain (Photo courtesy of DPA)

Seriously, what is the point of this? How on earth could this be fun? Do people who work hard all year in stressful jobs really have some sort of inner dialogue like this?
Well of course I could go somewhere peaceful and quiet, but I am European and I have a bajillion vacation days anyway, so I might as well waste some of them on an overcrowded beach so that I can go back to work as exhausted as I was when I left . . .

Okay, yeah because that makes loads of sense.
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4 comments:

  1. Ed Ward2:40 PM, June 02, 2009

    Yup. When I first visited down here in the summer, I was with a friend who wanted to do some beachcombing, so we drove out towards Sète, where the map indicated there was a nice long beach. Close to town, there were a couple of "campgrounds," ie, places with bungalows for rent. The beaches looked, if not as bad as your picture, seriously jammed. We drove on, of course. Not two miles away, the beaches were empty. We parked, got out, walked down to the water...oh, way off there was an umbrella with a couple of people under it. In 90 minutes, I saw one guy come walking along. So we eventually left, kept driving, and after another couple of miles, there was another colony, and beachside traffic jam.

    Must be a cultural thing. I don't get it either.

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  2. Inez Templeton3:57 PM, June 02, 2009

    Thanks Ed! Your story is actually quite telling. I mean it's not as if there weren't any quiet beaches around, folks just wanted to be jammed together on the one you wisely skipped. Ah well, I think you must be right about it being a cultural thing.

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  3. Ed Ward1:29 PM, June 03, 2009

    Also: there was a snack bar accessbile from their beach. Not from ours.

    Big deal, eh?

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  4. Inez Templeton1:42 PM, June 03, 2009

    OMG a snack bar??!! Well why didn't you say that in the first place? Obviously, a snack bar would definitely explain this madness ;-)

    The link takes you to my mom's favorite beach and the one we visited most frequently--with our our own picnic baskets overflowing--when I was growing up: http://www.topsailbeach.org/

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