We arrived in Watersound, Florida (in the panhandle) around midnight on Friday and began exploring our surroundings on Saturday. Our vacation rental is a two-story, 2,800 square foot town house that came with, among other things, a street legal golf kart. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of rental properties here and every one of them includes a golf kart. Our golf cart has a license plate, headlights, and blinkers. The golf kart is legal on any road with a 35mph speed limit or less. We’ve had ours up to 30mph and it’s pretty terrifying.
Across the street from our vacation community is The Hub, which contains a dozen restaurants that share indoor (but mostly outdoor) seating. Pretty much everything you order costs $15. The kids had $15 hamburgers. Susan had a quesadilla that came with chips and salsa for $15. Yesterday I had nachos that cost $15; today I had a lobster roll that cost $17. Drinks were also $15. Just kidding on that last one. Susan stocked the house with groceries and has been cooking breakfast for everyone to balance out the costs. We drove the car to the grocery store, not the golf cart.
Susan and I have swam in the ocean once, and the property’s swimming pool twice. Swimming in the ocean is an ordeal. First you have to pick a public access beach, one that hopefully has available parking. Then you have to walk down a hundred stairs, or a long ramp to access the beach. The sand here is white and incredibly soft. Walking through it is like walking through marshmallow cream; it’s like constantly walking on a stair climber because your feet are constantly sinking into the sand. After you’ve claimed your spot with a beach towel you have to enter the actual ocean, which is harder than it sounds with waves hitting you constantly. At one point I got knocked over and pummeled half a dozen times by waves before I could stand up. I felt like an old sock stuck in the clothes dryer! The beach had two flags flying, one red and one purple. The red one warns swimmers of an undertow. (The same day we were swimming in the ocean, three people elsewhere in Florida were pulled into the ocean and drowned.) The purple flag warns swimmers of “potentially dangerous marine life.” We learned what this meant when a tiny jellyfish stung Susan in the arm. They’re super small and cling to the floating seaweed. Susan said it stung about like a mosquito bite, and immediately knew when it happened. Anyway, when you’re done swimming in the ocean you have to reserve all that other stuff — walk through the soft sand (wet, this time), climb all the stairs, transfer most of the sand to the floorboard of your car, and drive home.
The pool is much more convenient. It’s large, and uncrowded. There’s no sand, seaweed, or jellyfish. The weirdest thing we saw at the pool was two women standing and walking around inside the pool reading large hardback books. At least they weren’t stinging anyone.
About five miles down the road from us is another food court, this one populated with airstream trailers that have been converted into restaurants. We ate across the street at a Cuban restaurant and lucked into one of only two tables that had shade.
Shade is important here because it’s hot. It’s always hot. It’s been 85-90 degrees, all day, every day. Everybody’s been putting on sunscreen, and everyone has burned areas of skin exposing which patches of skin were missed. Every time you open the door, a blast of hot air hits you in the face. We’ve been hot every day. On the day it rained, we were still hot, and also wet. As I’m typing this at 7pm, it’s 85 degrees with a humidity of 70%.
Earlier today we visited a Ron Jon Surf Shop. I’ve wanted to visit one of these stores for at least 30 years. In high school, a classmate transferred from Hawaii to Oklahoma and I remember him wearing Ron Jon shirts. I also remember seeing Ron Jon ads in all the skateboard magazines I used to read in the 1980s. I had a fun time looking through the skateboards and surfboards and all the other stuff they had in the store.
One thing I wanted to note, just for my own memory. The internet here is terrible. Half the time, I can’t get a signal on my phone. I’ve been using my MiFi with my laptop and it’s terribly slow as well. There are just so many people here. I almost never use the WiFi at restaurants, but sometimes here you have to if you want to tweet out pictures of your dinner, ha.
Speaking of dinner, tonight Susan ordered pizza and Key Lime pie and we’re sitting in the living room with basketball on. Everybody is sunburned and worn out… a perfect vacation.
I just got back from taking my (younger – 5 and 8) kids to the ocean in San Diego for the first time. The ocean can be a real workout, I had the most fun riding the boogie board I got from a beach side surf shop. I feel the same way – burned and tired and satisfied.