Before Mom, Amy and I went to Florida in January, I decided to buy a sun shelter for the beach. The beach is my absolute favorite place, but I don’t want any rays of the sun to touch my skin. Mostly. On previous trips that Mom and I have taken to Florida we had horrible luck with beach umbrellas. Umbrellas were generally included with our rentals, but we could never, ever get them to stay in the sand. On more than one occasion some big strong guy would come along and help us but even they couldn’t secure the umrellas and they’d collapse or blow away and were pretty much a disaster and an utter failure.
Now, I had noticed that others on the beach had shelters with just roofs and poles and were weighted down on each corner with sand in little pouches. This seemed like a wonderful idea so I decided to investigate purchasing one. And down the Amazon rabbit hole I went, first finding a shelter that looked pretty good, but then I started seeing beach tents. Wow, I thought, a beach tent! We’d be sheltered from the sun in a mighty effective way plus they had the little bags at each corner to fill with sand.
I settled on one design that seemed fabulous and got good reviews, but then couldn’t decide which one to get. There was one that said “four person tent” but the accompanying picture had four people sitting cross-legged on the floor of the tent with their knees almost touching. There was also a six-person tent, but would that be too big? I waffled about it for a while, as I usually do, but Kevin encouraged me to buy the 6-person one and it arrived promptly. Kevin and I immediately set it up in the living room.
Yeah, it looks pretty giant, doesn’t it? It’s actually a lot like a regular tent. I guess I can’t think of a way in which it isn’t like a regular tent. It was pretty easy to put together and then take down. Whichever cats were around at that moment thoroughly enjoyed checking it out. It has windows that you can zip up, and we had Mom come over and sit with us in the tent and decided that even though it was big, and weighed almost 10 pounds, it would be perfect, so we’d be comfortable in our beach chairs.
Even though it was a little heavy it folded neatly into its little bag. Good deal.
So we left on January 21st and on flight was at one p.m., what a wonderfully civilized time, plus it was a direct flight on Allegiant and I love that so much. Mom and I were in the exit row, so plenty of room for our long legs, We touched down, we got the car, we stopped for groceries as a Publix, and arrived at our lovely house in Englewood. I’d never even heard of Englewood, but Amy found the listing. One huge draw was this it was a six-minute drive to the beach. I always want to be near the beach, or better yet, on the beach, but this house looked really nice, and a pretty short drive. Here’s a short video of most of the house, except for Mom’s bedroom, which was quite lovely.
And that’s it for right now.
Ok then, February Grace.