Our Fun Years at the Beach with Our Kids
Note: Now that the kids are grown and gone, these memories & photos mean more than ever to us.
In the early 2000's, our trips to the beach became more regular as two things coincided. One was that the children were both well into elementary school and the other was that I took a social work job with a local public school district. Working for the public schools system gave me both spring break and at least part of the summer off with the kids. For six years we went to the beach twice a year and it was rare that we went to a beach that Paula didn’t get topless or naked.
In the summer of 2000 we went to Ocracoke Island on the North Carolina Outer Banks. Paula spent most of her beach time wearing just g-string panties (she as of then did not own a real thong bikini). It was particularly funny in that she had worked up a good tan in her bikini back home, so that she had distinctive bikini tan lines over which she wore her tiny thong. At the time she hated the photos because of that, but in time they became some of her favorites. For almost 10 years we had a collage of 5x7 and 8X10 photos from that trip mounted on foam board on our bedroom wall. It only came down after it was damaged in a redecorating project.
Again in the summer of 2001 we went to Ocracoke Island, staying again at the Black Beard Inn. Paula had begun to work at Victoria’s Secret and as a result had a lot of new lingerie that she was sure would make good beach wear. Thus, she wore a variety of things, all sexy and none designed for the beach.
One thing we had learned was that prior to nearly noon there was no one on the beaches up the road from the little town. So, she and I routinely got fully nude hanging out on the lonely beach.
By then Misty had figured out mom and dad were up to something. By that age, she must have realized that her friend’s parents didn’t go nude on the beach. As such she understood that Mom would want her “swimwear” back when the beach began to fill up. So, she did what any ten-year-old would do, she took mom's thong and bra, and ran off with them. Eventually, when other groups of people had joined us on the beach, mom wanted her stuff and had to chase daughter down to get it.
Later in the week, I set up one photo set at a busy section of beach with Paula wearing only a white shirt and instructed her to walk in the waves with her bottle of Simonov Ice. This was late afternoon and the beach was not really crowded, but it was full; as she got wet, the shirt became transparent. The photos were great and she liked the fact that a group of younger guys were brazenly watching.
We got another terrific set of photos from that trip the day we took the Ferry to Hatteras Island. Standing by our mini-van parked on the side of the road, she stripped naked so she could put on a blue thong body suit from Victoria’s Secret. For half an hour or so, while our kids played, she posed along the dunes, and then removed even the lingerie to pose nude. Again this was not a nude beach, nor as remote as the one’s on Ocracoke. Just when I’d shot the last frame of film and she wrapped a sarong around herself, a busload of teens came racing over the dune right to where we had been shooting nudes a moment before. A little while later we saw their bus and found this was a group of kids from a church youth group that apparently had been waiting (and watching) until we finished shooting to make their appearance.
The tragic events of 9/11/2001 had a particular impact on our life. The crash in the trans-Atlantic tourism trade brought the price of a hotel stay on Miami Beach within our price range. So in the summer of 2002, we were able to book a week in a first class ocean front hotel for less than $500. I rechecked the room rates in 2009 and they were $450 per night. The place was amazing, like “in a Hollywood movie” kind of amazing. It had a big formal lobby with huge bronze sculptures and oil paintings, restaurants and shops on the ground floor. In our room, we had an all marble bathroom and a magnificent view of the beach. For the kids the best thing was the Olympic-sized swimming pool that overlooked the ocean.
Once the family crossed the low dune onto the beach itself, we got a surprise; all of Miami Beach is top optional. The first thing we saw were three young women sunning with their boobs fully exposed. All I could think was “Toto, We’re not in South Carolina anymore.” Well, Paula wasn't going to look like a country bumpkin, but she didn't own a real thong-style bathing suit and she wasn't going to just wear panties here (how gosh). So we went shopping before we went to the beach. She bought several thong swimsuit bottoms (but only two with a matching top), beach towels with topless women on them and lots of sunscreen.
The entire week we were there while at the swimming pool she wore thongs and bikini tops and on the beach just the thong. She was hot if I can say so. She was 43 and looked better than she ever had, and to make it better she had “prepped” for the trip by going to a tanning bed in the months before because she did not want to repeat the “white buns” of the previous year at the Outer Banks, so she had a bronze tan from the first day.
I had borrowed a digital camera from my employers that year to augment my film Nikons. The digital camera was a very early model using a 3 ½” floppy disk as memory. So the photos were not remotely the same quality as my film cameras. It was a good thing we had the digital though, because even with the digital camera to augment my film cameras, it cost over $120 for film development when we got back.
Up the road from our hotel was the only officially sanctioned public nude beach in America; complete with lifeguards and vendors. Though we’d been nude at clubs and on relatively isolated beaches, to just drop our clothes with at least 100 people near enough to see was a little bit hard on the nerves.
Like so many of the new experiences we have tried, this was another thing that turned out to be different than we had expected. First, I’d expected lots of single guys looking to catch a glimpse of naked women. Not so. This was Miami after all and the single guys on this beach were virtually all gay. Not that that mattered to Paula’s viewing pleasure. The beach had many buff gay men preening for the attention of other gay men. Not only buff, it seemed like this was a "big penis only zone".
These guys would grease up, stroke until half hard then walk up and down the beach with their big penises and big muscles. So lesson learned, this is the place for girls to watch hot men who will not bother them. And there were a good number of good looking women. Later in the day, like after work hours, the gay preeners generally became less prominent and the beach filled with older couples and even families. It seems that there was an unwritten allocation of time on the beach.
In our two different visits to the nude beach, we took a good many photos. And at one point a little man with a thick Italian accent came over to talk to Paula. We had him take a few pictures of the two of us. Later we asked a couple to take our naked picture by the lifeguard tower.
If the nude beach was eye candy for women, South Beach was eye candy for men. It was filled with young people with buff bodies. About a third of the women wore thongs, and half of that third went topless. I kept waiting to be told I would have to leave because this beach was for pretty people only.
Though she liked the beach, Paula preferred the pool. At the pool, she had to wear a top, but it did not seem to matter if the top was see-through as she sometimes wore just an open weave cover-up as a top. Exclusively wearing thongs at the pool, Paula looked fabulous. I guess it’s a good sign when the husband would rather watch his forty-something-year-old wife than the young women.
Paula also loved the shopping. It was a bit odd to be out shopping on the main street, and then
girls in thong bikinis zoom by on their roller blades. Some of the designer shops shocked me with their prices, $800 blouses! On the other hand there were other shops that closed out for the designers and we bought a sheer red/black zebra striped blouse for Paula. When I say sheer, I mean you could read a book through it, although the stripes camouflaged a little. She wore it out shopping and dancing that night, of course she wore no bra underneath. At one club a good looking Latin guy was hitting on her and she was flirting up a storm, until his Latina girlfriend showed up and began screaming at Paula in Spanish. We were escorted out by the bouncers. We had quite a laugh once we were on the street.
For Spring Break in 2003, we took a nice trip back to Hunting Island just out of Beaufort, South Carolina. Due to money issues it was a short trip, just 2 nights, but that didn’t keep us from having some fun. Paula, contrary to acceptable behavior in SC, wore a sexy tiger stripe thong bikini set. She was most definitely the hottest thing on the beach. She got many very appreciative looks by guys walking up the beach, but we had to keep an eye out for the Department of Natural Resources officers who were patrolling on their little 4-wheelers.
The summer of 2003 we again went to Miami Beach for….. ho hum… more of the same; more beautiful beaches, more beautiful nearly naked (or fully naked) beach goers, more fun. We took fewer photos that year though because I didn’t have the borrowed digital and the cost of film/developing was way too high.
We did a spring break of 2004 trip to Daytona Beach. Well, I’d booked a hotel on the beach on-line. On their site it looked great. Once we got there it was a dump. Not just a dump, but a scary biker kind of dump. I’m usually very careful about using the credit card for things we can’t afford, but I was not going to let my family stay at that place. We told the manager we would not stay and left. It took a couple of hours but we found a very nice place up the beach.
On one hand, the sand on Daytona was like none other we’d ever seen; the hotel was great with a very family-friendly atmosphere and kids activities. But….. it was too family friendly for Paula’s thongs. However, her good old husband had done his homework. As it turned out than 20 minutes south of Daytona Beach, lay the north end of the 40-mile-long Cape Canaveral National Seashore. And….. I had found that between the North parking lot, to the south parking lot was over twelve miles of beach designated as clothing optional. So to the nude beach we went.
Only one problem. The kids were old enough to leave for an hour or two at a time while they napped and watched TV (as we did in Miami when we went to the nude beach), but not for an all day trip. Our solution was simple. We set ourselves up about 100 yards north of the sign that read “Beyond this point you may encounter nude sunbathers”. The real-estate between the sign marking the beginning of the nude beach and the first family on the “regular” beach was perhaps ¼ mile and was completely free of people, even during this spring break time. The nude sunbathers began just past the sign, but I guess the nice families north of the sign thought the evil nudist would eat them. So we had ¼ mile of beach all to ourselves.
Paula pulled off her shorts to reveal she again wore her tiger stripe thong bikini, but the top didn’t’ stay on for long. Now this was of course a no no on our side of the sign, but since when did Paula care? As people strolled by during the day, she got appreciative looks from a good many men and a few very nasty looks from women, but no one said anything all day. At some point Paula and I took a walk down the beach past ‘the sign’. She insisted we take a photo of her and the sign—so we took several as she removed her bikini (and I took off my trunks).
Past the sign the beach was much busier. Couples and singles old and young. All just relaxing in the sun.
The next morning Paula and I got up early. The kids were wiped out from all the sun the day before and so Paula left them asleep for a morning trip to the nude beach. This time we set up our umbrella and towels well into the nude area. She initially wore a very sexy one-piece that at least partially stayed on for around 30 minutes.
She splashed around in the ocean for quite a while. She watched an old man fishing with a huge pole. When she went over to find out what he was fishing for he said “sharks”. Yes sharks. So for a good while my dear naked wife stayed with this old man and even got to touch a shark he’d pulled from the surf. Needless to say she did not go back into the water after that.
For the summer of 2005 we went again to Daytona. The kids were getting older (12 & 14) and wanted to stay at the hotel as they were making friends now. We were there the whole week so we spent one morning at the nude beach without the kids and our last full day we spent, as a family just north of the nude beach sign, as we did the year before. The funniest thing that day was that Paula and Misty took a long walk up the beach. Because to Paula nude sunbathers were perfectly normal, before she realized it she and Misty had gone a good long way down the nude section of beach before it dawned on her that this might be upsetting to our fourteen-year-old.
It was not. To this day Misty loves to tell the story of her stroll with her mom down the nude beach and of the naked old man who begged them to stay with him and even offered them towels to rest on. Paula had spent most of that day in naught but her thong, with the same response as we had before. But this time when we packed up our mini-van we noticed a park Ranger watching us. Once we headed down the road out of the park he appeared behind me… andwrotes me a ticket for exceeding 25 mph in the park. To this day I am sure it was his way of punishing us for Paula’s near nudity on the non-nude part of the beach.