summer's end

I spent the last week on vacation, away from screens of computers and laptops and phones. Instead, we hiked through forests and camped amongst the trees. We carried our sleeping bags and mats and food and water on our backs. We worked up a good sweat.

We found a campsite across from the stream and set up our tent. We cooked up dinner over a little camp stove (no fires allowed) by boiling water and pouring into special freeze-dried camp food pouches.  

We slept on the hard ground in the darkness of the trees, with only the sounds of crickets and the stream and the occasional airplane flying overhead. In the morning, I did some yoga amidst the trees to wake up my stiff muscles for the return hike. Then we cooked eggs over the camp stove to eat with  homemade protein bars and hot tea for additional warmth + energy.  

We trekked back up the mountain, and spotted deer and snakes and signs of fall. Thankfully, no bears.

Then, the day after we returned with sore backs, we packed up and drove four hours to the beach. We stayed in a nice hotel for free thanks to many accumulated points from business travel. 

We sat on our beach chairs next to the crashing ocean and read books in the sunshine. We marveled at the size of the waves and the blueness of the cloudless sky and basked in the warmth of the sun. We trekked across giant sand dunes and marveled at the ingenuity of a pair of brothers at a flight memorial and found local restaurants to enjoy and dusted off our mini golf skills. We walked on the beach at nighttime and got up early so we could watch sunrise, and took a hundred photos of the pink sky above the churning sea. We swam in the salty water and bobbed in the waves and somersaulted as they crashed over us. We sat sandy and salty and finally got a bit of tan. 

Summer is glorious. I am glad we got this vacation in. It restored me. It is hard to explain just how powerful I find time at the beach. Love for the sea was instilled in me at a young age, perhaps due to my very first vacation to the Jersey shore at 3 months old. The only time I can truly say that I lived near the sea was the semester I spent in Ireland, with the Galway bay just a stone's throw from my little flat. And oh how I loved being so close to the water; I would go for long walks or runs along the shore and revel in the simple joy of walking barefoot through the sand, gazing into the angry waters. It was almost as if the draw to the water comes from my Irish roots and was awakened somehow during those months. There is just something about that expanse of water hugged by a stretch of white sand on one side and the brilliant blue of the sky on the other that speaks to a place inside my heart, not with words but with a deep, restful peace. And I know that being lakeside is seen as somewhat of an imposter when compared to the ocean, considered inferior to those who were raised next to coasts. For me though, in the years I lived in Chicago, the dazzling green of the lake that stretched out as far as eye could see had the same effect. I saw the lake almost every day: my apartment was just a few blocks away from sandy beaches, and I rode buses for miles next to the water, and I ran almost as many miles along the lake as I trained for races, and from my office downtown I could look out into the greys and greens and blues of the water, dotted with white sail boats in the summer or coated in ice and snow in the winter, every day I that I was at work. To be honest when I first moved to Chicago I was not a big fan of the city because of the immensity of it all; it was overwhelming. But the lake ~ the lake soothed me. The lake won me over. I went to the beach (yes, "beach", the wide stretches of sand count in my eyes, even if the waves are smaller than in the ocean) on a weekly basis when the weather was nice.  

I did not know how much I would miss it until it was no longer here. Summer just did not feel the same without it. 

But! Now I know that the even more glorious sea shore is just 4 hours away. And though summer is quickly drawing to a close, I am already so excited for next summer, as I imagine future trips to that stretch of sand, to that expanse of churning ocean, to that brilliant blue sky and the warm summer sun. And for the moment, I feel more ready to finally say goodbye to the summer, now that I've gotten my fill of sand and sea salt and sun.