Beaches and Happiness

People who live near the beach just don't seem to get it.  They cannot understand why some of us drive so far and so long just to spend a week in the sun.  (Funny how they can take it for granted that they have a beach right next to them but cannot understand why it's a luxury to the rest of us.)

For the first several days at the beach we visited the one across the street from our condo.  It was a short walk to a very crowded beach.  Even in the evening the beach looked like this:

I realize that's not really crowded but imagine that same stretch of beach with rows of beach chairs (available for rent for just $40-50 per chair for a day) then a row or two of tents behind it and really, not much more than 5 feet between you and your neighbors.  Gosh, people were so loud that you could hardly even hear the ocean.

That is why I felt like I was in heaven when we reached a decision to go to the state park beach for our last day.  This is what greeted us during the busiest time on the beach, at 11 am:

And this is the beach at 2 pm when the crowd had cleared out:

We had the roar of the ocean.  We had a breeze (I swear it was much cooler at this beach simply because we didn't have a gazillion people around us!).  We had a relaxing long day at the beach.  Precisely what we drove all those miles to achieve.  And we had Twinkies.  Yup, good stuff.