Sweet Jesus, I need an escape. That probably sounds pretty ridiculous to anyone who knows what my life has been like for the last year and a half. I’m always running off to somewhere. But, as I’ve said before, most of my trips have been rocket trips. I need a good ole fashioned vacay. The last time I hung out on a warm beach was the summer of 2005. It wasn’t a very good beach and I was with a whiney boyfriend. We didn’t last long.
I’m not exactly a beach baby. Even growing up in Florida, right by the ocean, I never cared much for the sand between my toes or in other parts of my body. I’d dive around in the ocean all day, but as soon as I was required to sit down for five minutes in the, ick, sand…I was over it. These days I regret never fully optimizing my time on the beach.
The last and one of the very few times I managed to just relax for long lengths of time on the beach was the long weekend I spent at Panama Beach. It was my freshman year of college in Tallahassee. I had two awful roommates and one roommate who refused to get involved. I needed a getaway. In October I booked two nights in a hotel right on the beach. It was off season, so it was dirt cheap. Sometimes, when I’m caught up in finishing school, meeting a deadline an article, or two-hundred pages into my third rewrite of this ridiculous novel I started forever ago, I long to head straight back to Panama Beach and that hotel.
The hotel was far from anything special. It was three floors of rooms full of the same tropical printed polyester comforters every other hotel in the southern part of the world uses. But it was on the beach. It was also clean, had a balcony that overlooked the ocean and the pool and had terracotta tiles. I’m not sure why the terracotta tiles were important, but I was impressed. I live in Ohio now, have a hard time imagining ever living in Florida again, but still think about having a living room floor made of large, terracotta tiles and it started that first afternoon in the hotel.
It may have been Florida, but it was still October. I spent my entire first day on the balcony in jean shorts and my FSU sweatshirt. I varied between looking at the ocean and looking at my laptop screen (mostly my laptop screen, though). Tallahassee was more inland than I was used to, so just breathing in the salty air of Panama was refreshing enough. That night I did what every guide book for absolutely any city, no matter how safe, would advise a young, single girl not to do: I left my sliding glass door wide open and fell asleep listening to the sounds of the waves crashing against the sand.
The next day I had only three things on my agenda and the first was food. I’d spotted a free-standing Chik-fil-a just a few miles back down the strip and I was determined to have lunch there. This was back before Chik-fil-a overtook the world and free-standing ones were like mini-Meccas only scattered every few hundred miles or so. I rolled out of bed at noon and headed straight for the illiterate cows. Oh, heavenly sweet tea!
Next on my list of things to do was to hit the souvenir shops. I had it in my head that the best Christmas gifts I could give my family were incredibly ridiculous and unneeded merchandise promoting Panama Beach tourism. I’ve yet to find anywhere more interesting, colorful and incredibly useless than a souvenir store. I love them. I love the snow globes and the various sized ships in varying sizes of bottles. I adore the postcards that range from overly cheesy, to incredibly inappropriate to downright disconnected to the scene. I always buy more postcards than I’ll ever send. The best thing about souvenir shops in Florida (and I imagine any other beach town) is that you can also get awesome towels, blow-up alligator floats (always the most popular) and water shoes. These things are, of course, absolutely necessary for the two to five days you’ll be spending on the beach this year. I left with a red & white Hawaiian print towel (despite already owning enough beach towels to sew together and keep the Statue of Liberty modest), a mobile made of ribbons, I can’t even remember what I got for my dad and, of course, probably a dozen postcards.
Walking out of my third (or twelfth) souvenir shop I looked up and laid eyes on what had to be the most amazing thing ever. A Dippin’ Dots store! That’s right! You know those kiosks in half the malls in America? The ones that sell ice cream that’s been frozen into tiny balls, thus making it take longer to melt. In Panama Beach they have a whole store! With tables and everything! I got a huge cup of minuscule chocolate balls and then plopped down at a picnic table to stare, bored, at the wall while I devoured them. Why? Because I could.
The last thing on my list was, of course, to write. This time I headed down to the beach with my notebook. Only a smattering of brave tourists splashed toward the water up and down the shockingly white beach (I grew up in Palm Beach. On the east coast, sand is beige. As it should be thank you very much.). I imagined they were all from Canada or Norway, some place where 65 degrees qualified as a record-high, even in July. I plopped down in a chair, pulled my knees up to my chest and my sweatshirt down over my knees and began to write.
At least for a paragraph or two.
When I woke-up it was almost dark. I trudged my way back up to my hotel room, crawled into my bed (again, with the sliding glass door open) and fell asleep. The next morning it was time to head home. I checked out at 12:01 p.m., drove to the nearby Eglin Air Force Base to gawk at boys in uniform for awhile, stopped off at a K-Mart so my parents could transfer me the money I needed to buy gas and get home (Damn Souvenir Shops!) and then headed back to Tallahassee.
I’m not positive, but I think that was my first and only experience with a real vacation. It was the kind of trip where every day wasn’t a new destination. It was one of those vacations where you have no itinerary other than to get to your hotel before midnight Friday night and then not check out until the last minute on Sunday. It was fun but laid-back. Inspiring but not exhausting. I’m ready for another trip like that.
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