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I am not a vacationere (a word that I made up to sound fancy, that means, "Someone who frequently takes vacations to beautiful and exotic places"). The last three vacations I have taken in the last six years, have all been to the same place: Destin. As you may have predicted from the title, I am there now. Sitting quietly, trying to eat all the leftover food and drink the leftover wine that cannot make the trip home tomorrow, and I am finding myself feeling more than a little reflective.
My first trip to this area was in 2008. My then-boyfriend-now-husband and I made the trip in a wildly unreliable car with less than fifty dollars in spending money. We stayed at a really special little hotel that ran us a tab of $29.99 a night and ate sandwiches every meal. We laid around on the beach and felt like we were a million miles away. We were young and amused by both the people and the spectacle of the touristy town. I specifically remember one day of laying on the beach, mostly asleep, marveling in the newly acquired freedom in my life. I was happy.
Fast forward two years, and again I am on the Emerald Coast. This time with my husband and in-laws. I was three months pregnant. Just preggo enough to look fat, but not cute and round. I wrote a blog post then about my swimsuit mishap (How I Ended Up Flashing on Spring Break), but that is not the only memory I have of that trip. We had all gone down to the beach, and my father-in-law sprung for the rental umbrella and beach chairs (we had longed for them last time). I climbed in into the chair and covered myself up in a towel. I daydreamed about our baby. When I wasn't doing that, I was reading one of the three Louis Erdrich books (which soothe my soul) that I had brought along, and I occasionally looked up from my book to find my husband tromping through the waves in his own version of beach joy. And I was happy.
And now, here we are again, another two years later, this time with an 18-month-old kiddo in tow. We knew we were not treading into easy territory with the long car ride, studio-style hotel room where we can all see each other all the time, and a first introduction to the sand and saltwater, but we wanted to spend sometime together as a family and share with him something that was special to us. Each interaction with water was only minutely better then the one before. He was still crying in the pool at day five, but there was no more screaming. The beach also took some getting used to. There was a lot of confusion and hysteria, and it wasn't always just the baby. It can be very draining to contain a child in certain circumstances.
The night before leaving, we found a great little local coffee shop called, Starbucks, maybe you've heard of it? This one was real fancy-inside of a Target. We sprung for Ventis and hit the beach at dusk. Walking down to the shore, our son's wind-up started. It is a combination of turning into a screaming noodle if he is being held, or a limp, leg-less, scream machine if he is holding hands and walking. We scooped him up, made a few long strides, and quickly sat down facing the water. After a few seconds, he realized we weren't going to make him go in the water, and he calmed. He reached down and grabbed handfuls of sand (something that took us days to convince him was ok) and he began to amuse himself. The screeching stopped. He started to chatter at us and laugh at the feeling of the sand. We admired the silhouette of him and immediately forgot about the screaming, that had ended just minutes before. My husband and I began to quiet. Really quiet. We sat there in the dark, drinking our cold coffee, looking back between the water receding into the dark horizon and collection of stars we had forgotten existed since we moved to a city. Meanwhile, our son walked in circles around us lovingly putting fistfuls of sand onto both of our heads. And we were happy.
