Hard Rocks, Cold Water: The Beach at Dunnottar Castle in Scotland

by Gigi

One of the things that happens when you're told you have cancer is that you stop and think about what you want out of life. I'm lucky in that I've always been good at seizing the day, so I didn't have a whole lot of new ground to cover.

Therefore I find I'm not longing to do different things with my life. Instead, I'm going to do things BIGGER.

For example, one thing I haven't been doing as much of lately as I'd like to is traveling abroad. Before my diagnosis a little over a month ago, I was planning one trip. Now I'm in the process of planning three.

Traveling to a sunny beach to sunbathe isn't my kind of scene. I'd much rather go hiking along a cold and treacherous cliff overlooking a rough sea. Such as along the cliffs near Dunnottar Castle in Scotland.

Now this is my kind of beach. I took the photos below on the trip I took to the UK for my 30th birthday. The castle ruins sit atop rocky cliffs next to the North Sea, and the only way to reach the ruins is to hike down a steep path and then climb up another one. It's both spectacular and also remote enough that I've visited when it's been eerily empty. Definitely my kind of beach.

While planning upcoming trips to Europe and Asia, I also realized I've been to all but 7 of the 50 states. Anyone feel a road trip coming on? 

Lastly, I promised I'd show another new look for my Sexy Cancer Hair. So here you go!

Martha's Beach Horror Experience

When I was young...maybe six or seven years old...my family went on a Hawaii vacation over Christmas break.

Here is what I remember.

Like any horror movie, we open on a beautiful scene.

We stayed with my mom's friend, a beautiful Vietnamese woman. Her family owned hotel properties on the island, and she invited us to her gorgeous beach-side home where the ocean's waves were practically a welcome mat.

She had a son named Paul who was about my age, and while my parents insisted we would get married when we were older, all I remember is that I wanted to kick his ass at everything. If he dove off a diving board, I dove off a higher one.

She took us to luaus and other celebrations where I was constantly singled out to go on stage or hula. At the time, I thought this was because I was unbearably cute. While this may have been true, I now realize it's because I was with the boss.

Like any horror movie, there was a turn.

The shenanigans became too much.

My brothers held me over an open volcano pit, threatening to drop me inside.

I went for a swim in the ocean and a strange woman encouraged me the race a wave. I was tossed around and unable to break the surface. I took gulp after gulp of salt water which stung my lungs until the wave finally tossed me onto shore and I choked it out.

I was buried in the sand up to my neck, unable to move, and while movies had made this seem fun really it was cold and kind of sucked and hey did I mention there are bugs in the sand?

Hawaii was beginning to lose its shine.


Like any horror movie, we soon realize the true horror is not what we expected.

We left cookies out the night before Christmas, but two things struck me was incredibly wrong. For one, how was Santa going to find us. For two, there was no friggin' chimney in this place. Was Santa supposed to use the door?

I worried about it all night. I couldn't sleep. I finally decided I needed to leave the cookies outside on the doorstep. I slipped out of my room (in what I imagine to be an adorable nightie) and saw the unthinkable.

My parents and their friends in the dining room eating Santa's cookies.

Now I wasn't an idiot.

I'd had my doubts about Santa. But now they were confirmed.

What I hadn't known is that my parents were in on it.

I left Hawaii knowing two things for certain.

1. Nature could kill you. Like really, totally kill you.

2. Parents are deceitful liars.

So while I like a good beach, Hawaii can suck it.

My Life in Beaches

My life can be measured in Beaches. Almost all (with the exception of the birth of my children and my wedding day) the special days in my life revolve around a beach. When I was little we would visit Rehoboth Beach in Maryland.

Image courtesy of Paul McGehee Art

My great-aunt and great-uncle had apartments right on the beach. As family we could rent the place for dirt cheap (the ONLY way my parents roll) if we helped clean the apartments at the end of our stay. Looking back as an adult, I was too little to help but I’m sure it couldn’t have been much fun for my mother. However, my memories of the beach were magical.

Then we moved to the Midwest and for awhile I was beach-less.

When I traveled to France at age twenty, I spent a fascinating and liberating three days on the beach in Nice.

My senior year of college, I road-tripped to Ft. Lauderdale with my college pals and spent my days on the beach drinking beer and posing in my bikini.

When I met my husband in college, his parents lived in Myrtle Beach so I was lucky enough to visit the beaches in South Carolina several times.

Sunrise on Myrtle Beach

Our first vacation together we visited the beach in Pacific Grove. Our bed and breakfast was across from the boulders with a room overlooking the shore. We left the windows open at night to listen to the susurrous of waves as we slept.

Seven Gables Inn in Pacific Grove

For my honeymoon, my husband and I visited three islands in Hawaii and I learned to snorkel and spent most of my days either in or on the ocean.

Finally as an adult I moved West and my love affair with beaches resumed. I did have to alter my perception when I realized that the ocean on the West Coast is COLD. Our first vacation after my son was born was to the beach in Santa Barbara. I have the cutest picture (not digital sadly) of him in his diaper and a little white hat with beach balls on it, squeezing sand through his pudgy little fingers and smiling.

Rio Del Mar beach


Every year when my kids were little we would trek to Rio Del Mar for a few days. Boogie boards, skim boards, sand pails and shovels to make castles and dig for sand crabs. Coming home entailed shower after shower to get all the sand from our hair but the inconvenience was worth every moment we wrung out of the trip.

We also spent at least one weekend a year in Monterey (arguably one of the most beautiful places on earth), crawling over the rocks and peering into tide-pools to search for anemones, crabs and little fish.

In the past few years, I visited the Mexican coast at Puerta Aventuras. The white sand beach of the Caribbean at Atlantis in the Bahamas.

The ancient fishing pools of King Kamehameha

The absolutely amazing Kohala coast of the Big Island where we swam with turtles and other tropical fish in a shallow reef.

And most recently, we spent a day on the beach on Tybee Island in Georgia.

The Lighthouse at Tybee Island


The ocean is integral and necessary to my survival. I know that I will continue to make visiting beaches a priority in my travels and I’ll treasure those memories just as much.

Hope you enjoyed this little road trip! And if you have a beach that you love and that I need to visit--TELL ME! :)

Lisa

ps. I started thinking about all the beaches I’ve visited in my life and marveled that there were so many. I purposely did not read any of the other Pens’ posts before I wrote this. I didn’t want to be influenced or feel that I couldn’t express my deep love for the ocean because it had already been done before.

But what I have to say now, is y'all are crazy. The shush of the waves, the sun searing your skin, the scrubby roughness of sand against your feet. The soothing waves of ocean, walking the shoreline, searching for dolphins, turtles, seals. Scouring tide pools for the variety of creatures that live in the crevasses. The endless magnificent power of water and the sheer openess of the Universe. Sunlight and moonlight shimmering on the waves. How can you not LOVE the beach?

The Delicate Flower/Fusspot Goes to the Beach

L.G.C.Smith

You know I can’t resist recounting the suffering I endured in childhood or any opportunity to complain. The notion that if I don’t have anything good to say, I shouldn’t say anything is just plain no fun at all. I live to rant.


I first saw the ocean at age five somewhere along the Oregon Coast west of Portland. We had just moved to Beaverton from Billings, Montana. My mother and us kids had never seen the ocean, which my father, with a Navy stint under his belt, was determined to address at once. Our first weekend in Oregon, before the moving boxes were unpacked and the bunk beds set up, my dad piled my mom, seven and a half months pregnant with my youngest sister at the time, and the three of us kids, ages five, three, and eighteen months, into the Volkswagen bug and headed for the Pacific Ocean.

It was November. The beach wasn’t much improved by the intermittent snow. It was grey. Grey water, low grey sky. That wasn’t so bad. At least I didn’t get a sunburn. The worst, as I was to discover is usually the case, was the sand. Sand is evil. I don’t care how pretty it looks, it’s not nice.

In this case, it was grey and covered with clear bubbly things that turned out to be jellyfish. My dad picked one up on his car key and dared me to touch it. Huddled in my snowsuit, I refused. My sister, brother and I finally took refuge behind my mother, using her as a windbreak. We pleaded to sit in the car. When frozen spume began pelting us, my dad finally relented. (The picture below is the total antithesis of that Oregon beach. It's on Guam. That's my brother in the water. He was five.)


When we showed little enthusiasm for further beach trips, my dad found a lake for us to camp beside near Fort Clatsop. It was close to the beach, but it had its own special kind of lake beach hell that involved being devoured by mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds while sinking up to our knees in mud.

A few years later my Dad dragged us all out to Guam. This was ostensibly for his job, but it might have been purely for the potential to inflict torture on me. On the way, we stopped in Hawaii to visit our cousins. There were some bad beach experiences: Sun burn at Hickam Beach. Flattened by a sneaky (and big) wave at Waimea Bay. Sand in all the usual uncomfortable places, including rather a lot permanently embedded in my scalp. You don’t know pain until you’ve tried to rinse all the sand out of your hair with a sunburned scalp underneath.

And dear God, is there any more dastardly garment in the world than a wet, clinging swim suit? Especially when you have to go to the bathroom and you need to get it down fast when you’ve waited for your turn in the long, long lines at the totally inadequate beach bathrooms? And you’re a kid whose parents don’t believe in bikinis on little girls? And you’ve fully embraced the rule that you never, never ever pee in the water?

All this was nothing compared to what was coming in the three years on Guam. The sand in Guam is special. The island is surrounded by a coral reef. It’s not like Hawaii at all. The ocean breaks on the reef, and there’s a lagoon inside. There’s coral everywhere. Coral is sharp. The sand is full of coral. Cuts from coral don’t tend to heal well. They easily abscess. Tropical climate. Weird microbes. Bleh.

To protect your feet, you wear shoes. This was before water shoes. We wore Keds.

Can I just say that swimming in wet Keds sucked. They felt like the proverbial cement overshoes. Walking and running in not-very-nice sand in wet Keds wasn’t much fun, either. They attracted clumps, which caused stumbling and made me lose races. They rubbed on my heels. I got blisters. They tracked whole deserts worth of sand into VW vans and bugs, and into the house if one wasn’t careful. This typically caused lots of parental yelling. The one advantage, aside from avoiding coral cuts, was that when I accidently stepped on sea slugs, it wasn’t as disgusting as it would have been in bare feet. Having your ankles spayed with sea slug guts is never fun, but at least they didn’t get stuck between my toes.

I’ll spare you the times my father tried to force me to snorkel. I couldn’t coordinate breathing through the tube. He got mad, and it scarred me for life. I have never wanted to snorkel since. Alas. And the agony of constantly having to buy ugly swimming suits was traumatic. I thought it would never end. All those years of being dragged on almost daily family trips to the beach have left me a lesser, wounded soul.

For the record, I don’t actively hate beaches anymore. I’ll even seek them out as long as there’s no sunbathing or swimming required. No other people present is best, but sometimes that can’t be helped, so up to twenty people on a good long beach is okay. Dogs don’t count.

Ah. Beaches.

The River

If there is a perfect summer day, its spent on the rocky banks of the Russian River.

Pack up a cooler and some towels. Bring along an old cotton dress to throw over your bathing suit if you want to stop in at the shops that dot the country road.

Spend the afternoon floating on the water. Watch your kids splash each other at the river's edge.  Read a book on the shore. Eat the strawberries that you bought from the stand down the way. Feel every moment of the day go by.

No Beach Vacation for Me

By Juliet

I’ve never been to Hawaii. I know, I know. It’s glorious. Gorgeous. Incredible. I’ve tried to go, several times. But each time I add up the airfare, and the cost of hotels, and ponder the tourist beach culture…and then wind up going to Mexico or Europe.

The thing is, I'm not really a Beach Vacation kind of gal.

Normally I skip the beach altogether. When I do go to beach towns, I prefer Mexico, where I can speak in a foreign language, drink really great tequila, eat great Mexican food, hang out with friendly Mayan folks and tromp around ancient ruins. The only Mexican town I’ve been in that I didn’t like was Cancun, which is a modern city built entirely to cash in on the beach culture: it’s full of big tourist hotels, tourists, frat boys and girls, and sugary frozen drinks. Um...not my idea of fun.
Above, the ruins in Tulum, a Mayan city built on some incredible real estate

None of which is to say I don’t like the ocean, or the beach for that matter. I love the ocean. I grew up in the Bay Area, and whenever I’ve been called upon to live out of easy reach of the sea I feel a bit jittery. Just knowing it’s there is soothing to me. I think there’s a sneaky little part of my brain that figures if the sh*t really goes down, I can always lash some inflatables together and set off in a raft. If nothing else, it would be a poetic way to die, better than, ya know, waiting on shore for the zombie apocalypse *nods to Sophie*

But as for sitting on the sand, fighting off the tan you really want but aren’t allowed to have (skin cancer, dontcha know) with oily, expensive sunscreen? Not so much.

I like doing something when I’m on a coast. I’ve already written about my summer working a corn-dog stand at Santa Cruz’s Beach Boardwalk – now, put a roller coaster (or an entire amusement park) on the beach, and I’m sold.

I also adore the rugged northern California coast, the land of my birth. I love climbing rocks and checking out tide pools and peering, breathless, over cliffs so steep it feels as though you’re about to fall.

Once I was on the beach in Scotland when snow flurries starting swirling about us. It snowed on the beach. As a native Californian, it had never occurred to me that it could snow on a beach. Once I thought about it, it was a “duh” moment – after all, there are coasts and beaches all over the world, including in places like Alaska, where it sure as heck snows on the beach. I went in the late summer, and it was still cold.


at left, Tuluk gave me a ride on a beach along the Bering Straight. No mai-tais, but great memories.

I want to go to Jamaica one day, but I wouldn’t go to one of the resorts. One of my best friends is from Jamaica, and I’d love to visit the island nation with her, to meet her family, learn about the history, the culture, soak in the music…they speak English there, but with the kind of musical cadence that is a joy to my ears.


At right, a beach in Jamaica, calling my name

So chances are that come vacation time, I won’t be sitting on a beach drinking mai tais. I might well be in the local museum, though, or hiking along the cliffs. Tasting the local fish specialty, or at the very least, building a freaking awesome sand castle.

Oh, screw the beach. It's time to go back to Mexico and climb a pyramid.

Salt

I'm not comfortable if I can't see the ocean, in some way or another, every day. Inland, I'm cranky. Itchy. I don't fit into my skin. I spent a summer in Colorado once, and I felt as if I couldn't breathe the entire time. Where I live now, in order to come home, I have to drive down a steep hill--the view is a wide expanse of the San Francisco Bay, a perfect shot of the city in the distance, sometimes obscured by fog, sometimes sparklingly clear. Sometimes, on perfect nights or gorgeous days, I just pull over and stare at the water for long minutes.

But the best place for me is an island. Surrounded on all sides by water? Yes, please. That's where I feel most at home.

1. My parents met in Western Samoa. Dad (in the Peace Corps) lived on Apia and heard about a woman with the NZ Diplomatic Service who lived on Savai'i who had a bigger record collection than he did. He called her; the rest is Herron history.

2. My mother was from New Zealand. She was from the South Island, and I think her blood that runs in my veins was what infected me first. Once, on a trip to New Zealand, during a plane refueling stop in Fiji (remember those?), my sister Christy and I got tired of waiting for Mom to come back to us where we were sitting on our suitcases. A little worried, I set out to find her and found her in the middle of a ring of island dancers, swaying and moving to a rhythm she understood. She was exotic and gorgeous at that moment, more than my mother--she was a woman I didn't understand but wanted someday to be.

3. When I was a teenager, we went to live on Saipan, a tiny island in the Northern Marianas, north of Guam. Of every good thing in my childhood (and luckily, there were many), living there was the best part. We were home-schooled in the morning, and every afternoon we went to a beach. We snorkeled on the Philippine Sea side, and we jumped off volcanic rock into deep swirling waters on the rough Pacific side (what was Mom thinking?). Set on the Ring of Fire, earthquakes were a daily occurrence, and we'd lie on our mats and watch them happen: little ripples of sand that looked like rumpled bedsheets, moving toward us, under us, and on. The beach was our classroom, our playground, our home. Digging my fingers and heels into the sand, I held on as hard as I could.

4. In the early 90s, I visited Venice for a day and fell head over heels in love. I've been back as often as possible since. It doesn't make sense how that city got into my veins, but I think it can best be explained by this: 117 miniscule islands, connected by small bridges. Sometimes only mere steps separate these islands, and of course, because much of it is man-made, there is no beach, per se (we could talk about the Lido, but let's not), but the water matters to me more than sand, and it's home.

I have a theory that there are three kinds of people: ocean people, desert people, and mountain people. The passion for each is probably the same, although I can't understand the other two. They are like a foreign language--I understand that there are adverbs and nouns in those languages also, but surely, the words can't be as beautiful, can they? The words peace and rest can't sound the same on an inland plain as they do on the beach, can they?

When I sit and imagine my perfect writing spot, there is always a desk at a window that overlooks the water. At night, I can see the moon tracing a path to the shore, and the breeze flutters the curtains. And in the mornings, I can smell salt.