A Nondescript Vacation Is an Awesome Vacation (Which Does Not Mean I Won't Write at Length about It)

[dawn_felagund]

I've been in Ocean City all this week (hence I'm quieter than usual, i.e., pretty much silent except for handling site-related stuff), home last night. It was a beautiful week for the beach and, all in all, pretty nondescript, which is sometimes exactly what a vacation needs to be

Comments

[heartofoshun]

There is also something about watching a boat go out to sea. And something about a boat coming in from sea.

I am with you all the way that! I used to love to stay in tiny towns in Mexico with nothing to do but watch the shrimp boats go out at night and come back in the morning and other guys pull in nets and mend them on the beach. It feels like going back in time or something. I am not sure what the magic is.

Sounds like you had a great time except for the bus/hangry incident and the motel drama.

Fantastic pictures.

[dawn_felagund]

Really the motel drama was my only complaint! It would have been nice if the bus came on time, but we always view riding the B as a form of entertainment in itself. And the website was wrong about the time the band came on, so we would have been a half-hour early if we'd been on time.

There is just something so essential and romantic about a small boat heading out upon a massive sea. But you know that I have a fascination with the ocean and boats generally! I should count sometime but figure that at least half of my o-fic stories involve the sea in some significant way.

[indy1776]

I'm glad you had a good time, though I'm sorry Bobby didn't get much surfing in. (Though I'm rather relieved he's not able to go out surfing in Arthur's aftermath; I was appalled when I heard the beaches on the East Coast were open. Rip currents are nothing to play with.)

I'm a little amused to hear that you broke your kite when you first got it because I did that with mine (which isn't a stunt kite). Thankfully, it was just the wooden crosspiece snapping in half, and duct tape's held it together ever since.

Those are lovely pictures.

[dawn_felagund]

The man who is teaching Bobby to surf was very emphatic that he should not go out Thursday evening or Friday because of Arthur. He is a national longboarding champion and said that he would not be going out because the water would not be safe. That was more than enough for Bobby to likewise stay in the sand!

Sure enough, though, Beach Patrol had several rescues on the 4th, post-Arthur, including a rescue in which the Coast Guard had to be called in because the beach patrolers who responded to a surfer in distress also became trapped in the Inlet due to the size of the waves. (There was also a death being reported as of last night, due to rip currents, and the headline is still showing on Google, but the article is no longer posted. Not sure what's up with that, but we've had two rip current-related deaths already this season in OC, both during Senior Week

[indy1776]

Yay! I'm so very glad to hear that.

I don't know why, either. It probably is the "won't happen to me" thing… but really. It's not that hard to stay out of the water. The ocean is not friendly. (Beats me why with the danger, the beaches just didn't stay closed. I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around it.)

When I was in Pensacola at the end of May, my parents and I went for a walk on the beach despite the on-and-off rain, though it was generally off at that point. It was my birthday, our last night there, and just a few minutes walk wouldn't hurt anything. The red flags were flying due to rip currents and the beach was thankfully deserted. I walked where the waves came up on the beach, and at one point, one receding wave nearly dragged me into the water proper, which was an "oh shit rip current! I didn't know you could feel them on the beach itself" moment. I found out the next morning that someone had gone swimming just over the border in Alabama and predictably drowned.

I'm glad you were able to get it flying again swiftly. :D

[dawn_felagund]

The ocean is not friendly.

No it's not. I'm a strong swimmer, I love the sea more than any other natural setting on earth, and I'm respectful as hell of it. It baffles me when people treat it like a kiddie pool. It's a vast, impersonal, and dangerous-on-many-levels natural force.

I was rather surprised that OC apparently sent out the Beach Patrol later in the day on the 4th, once Arthur blew over. I would have thought they would have kept them in to discourage swimming, but I figured that they assumed people would get in, Beach Patrol or no, and wanted to at least make sure that there was someone on hand who could rescue a person caught in a rip current, for example. OC has a swim-at-your-own-risk policy when Beach Patrol is off-duty; I don't know if they ever close the beaches there. I would assume there's something like that in place, but I don't know what it is.

which was an "oh shit rip current! I didn't know you could feel them on the beach itself" moment.Now imagine if you'd slipped and fallen and couldn't swim

[brookeoflorien]

Assateague Island! :D (I'm grinning in real life. I love horses and ponies).

Ugh, swimming. I love it, it's one of the only athletic/excercise things I can do without pain, but I'll never understand the mentality that it's in any way a safe thing to just run into the ocean without knowing what you're doing, even though half my relatives seem to love the sink or swim method to teaching how to handle swimming and the ocean...

[dawn_felagund]

Assateague is a great place to visit, if you haven't already! :) We've probably been a dozen times and have seen ponies every time. Sometimes, you can see them from Ocean City, across the Inlet. In the summer, they are often on the beach. And there are foals ... 8)

It scares me to hear of people running into the ocean who can't swim. As Indy notes above, it doesn't take a lot of water to feel the pull of a rip current, and all it takes is a slip and a fall to be pulled out to where a person can no longer stand up. Several people die every year in Ocean City because of this.

[brookeoflorien]

I haven't been yet, though I dearly want to go! I've rarely been able to leave the area I grew up, except to see my dad's mom and siblings. The foals must be adorable!

When I was little - between the ages of 5 and 10, with my sister being almost 3 years younger than me, and our cousin 2 years younger than here - I can remember several times when they managed to get out of the house while we were down at my dad's mom's and roam the beach with me chasing them. Now that I'm old enough, I can understand why my mom always seemed to be upset to hear vacation stories like that. :/

[marta_bee]

I am with you over the ... romanticism, I guess, for lack of a better phrase, of boats and harbors. When I have an afternoon to kill I'll buy a ticket to Ellis Island, which comes with all-day access to a ferry that hits a lot of tourist sites in the lower harbor. Sometimes I get off and go to the museum if they have a new exhibit, but mostly I just ride around on the boat all day. It's small enough and low enough in the water, city-subsidized but geared more toward tourists and families than commuters so it has some nice observation decks.

I was a bit surprised to see you think recent court cases make rereading Handmaid's Tale timely, because personally I wonder if sometimes the way we think about court cases like that is needlessly apocalyptic. There are things that worry me, that make the world of that book seem a little too close for comfort, but they're more in the opinions I hear about women and people getting "friendzoned" and a lot of the rhetoric coming out in the aftermath of the California shooting, for instance - the

[dawn_felagund]

The ferry trip sounds lovely! I would certainly do that myself. (I have been on that boat out to Ellis Island but was one of the tourists with a place in mind to get to and then back. :) There is just something about the OC fishing boats sailing out to the horizon with their "arms" up in the air ... *happy sigh*

I was definitely being a little melodramatic in my assertion about The Handmaid's Tale. Do I think the Hobby Lobby and buffer zone cases mean that I am going to be stuffed into a red costume and trained to bear a privileged man's children? No. Certainly not. However, I do think that both cases show an acceptance of certain views that parallel those in THT. Taking the buffer zone case, for instance: the idea that women can be harassed, threatened, and physically blocked from receiving basic health care (since the majority of women harassed by protesters are seeking nothing to do with abortion care). The fact that there has been clinic violence--which those buffer zones were in response to--also suggests that we're okay with