Some people wait for months to take winter vacations
where they can fly down mountains on a pair of skis.
Others love getaways where they're hiking over mountains
and through meadows. Still others love window shopping excursions where they
wander in and out of expensive boutiques.
For me, the best vacation is spent on the beach under an
umbrella with a good book, listening to the waves crash on the shore, tension
and stress melting away.
My favorite beach is in Gulf Shores, Ala. Our family's
been going to the same condo and the same spot on the beach for over 25 years.
We started going to Gulf Shores when we lived in
Louisiana and our boys were toddlers. We kept going because of the
family-friendly attitude there.
For our first few years, Gulf Shores stayed a quiet retreat
with inexpensive restaurants and a nearby outlet mall for families on a budget.
In the last decade, however, Gulf Shores' popularity has exploded.
The county added a huge outlet mall, manicured golf courses
and an endless sea of non-descript chain restaurants. They were looking for
those big-city bucks the Florida destinations were raking in, so they jumped on
the commercial bandwagon.
As a result, Gulf Shores changed from a laid-back hideaway
into a elbow-to-elbow city of high-rise, expensive condominiums. The growth
also brought crowded roadways, expensive souvenir shops and wall-to-wall tourists
in stores and restaurants.
Every year, I whine about the traffic jams and cheap
keepsakes and say we'll find another place to vacation. Maybe this is the year
we'll go to the mountains, I'll tell my husband, or better yet find a nice
place in the Hill Country.
My son kept telling me about Surfside and how much he
thought I'd like it. I'd heard the Texas
beaches were crowded and the water dirty. He kept telling me I was wrong, but I
was secretly holding on to what I knew was familiar. Change is difficult,
especially a change that requires one to give up such a beautiful place.
But one recent Sunday afternoon, he invited me to come to
Surfside with his family. I decided to see what a Texas beach was all about,
and I packed the car with my umbrella and chair and headed south.
At first, I wasn't too excited. The hour-long drive took
me past fields of smoking refineries and rusted oil tanks. When I pulled up to
the beach access, though, I was pleasantly surprised. The sand wasn't quite as
white as the sand in Alabama, but it was clean.
The water wasn't that deep emerald green, but the same earthy
smell of salt-water oceans was in the air. The beach wasn't too crowded, and the
sounds of laughter and giggles from children down the beach could be heard
faintly.
It's difficult to change a 25-year tradition, but I
realized it was foolish to keep driving all those miles to a beach when
Surfside was close to home.
With some reluctance and a few tears in my eyes, I signed
the papers to sell our time share. It was time to turn to what's close to home.
That's not only the beach in Surfside, but my family. As majestic
as the waves are when they crash on those sugar-white beaches in Alabama,
nothing's better than watching my grandchildren laughing and jumping in the waves
on a beach here in Texas.
So now I keep my beach chair and umbrella handy because I
never know when I'll need to recharge my batteries. That surf, sand and sun therapy
session is just down the road.
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.
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