Refreshed and sorta tan

I had a great vacation! We were in northwest Florida, halfway between Panama City and Destin. I was sad to leave the beach, but I'm happy to be home and ready to get back to work.

Every day we'd get up, have breakfast, strap on bathing suits and lube up with sunscreen (SPF 15 for my friend, 55 for me) and lounge on the beach till lunch. After lunch we'd go back out till around 5, then come in for showers, snacks and drinks. Most nights we went out to dinner around 8 pm, then came home and went to bed. That's basically my ideal beach vacation. To top it off, I didn't pay for anything other than my plane ticket and part of a fishing trip. Sweeeeet.

I got only a light tan, due in part to liberal application of SPF 55 and to spending time in the shade to avoid an unpleasant rash I get with too much intense sun exposure, but I got it on much more of my skin than I had intended. I had this great bathing suit from a couple of years ago. It was a relatively modest "tankini" that covered my whole midriff. At the last minute when I was packing, I tossed in an old string bikini just in case. Good thing I did, because the first day as I was putting on the good suit, I heard a ripping sound. The elastic was totally shot through the whole thing. I was really not thrilled about wearing the skimpy backup bathing suit in front on my friend's family, but her suit was even skimpier than mine, so I'm sure they didn't care. Actually, that’s the thing with the beach. Everyone is so self-conscious, yet nobody really cares what anybody else looks like. We all need to just get over it.

The swimming wasn’t too great owing to lots of yucky seagrass/algae stuff and an unappealing density of jellyfish, so we mostly sat under umbrellas reading books. I read Lonesome Dove, which is one of the best books I’ve ever read. At nearly 1000 pages, it took me almost the whole week to finish it. Spending that much time in a book that is that well written gets you really attached to the characters; it was really sad at some parts, so the last day on the beach I was trying to stifle sobs as I read. I almost never cry, but this book just got to me. Sigh… In contrast, I read most of a Janet Evanovich mystery (Lean Mean Thirteen) that BFF loaned me for my long waits for flights home. It sucks (although I guess it could turn around at the end). I’ve been hearing people go on and on about how great these Evanovich books are, but I certainly won’t read another.

Well, I’m going to start reading the 213 blog posts that accumulated in my reader last week and take a look at my email. Hopefully they’ll be better than Lean Mean Thirteen and less sad than Lonesome Dove.