Life's a beach, especially if you go there

I'm tired. Exhausted is more like it. I'd sit down and relax, but it feels like half the Sahara Desert is wedged up a medically sensitive area of my anatomy we don't normally discuss in a family newspaper.

Did I mention my skin hurts? You know what a lobster looks like after you dip it in boiling water? That's my skin. If you gave me a hearty pat on the back right now, I'd jump right out of my skin. And I'd be OK with that.

Even without any formal medical training, you will recognize these as the telltale symptoms of someone who has just returned from a fun day at the beach. I will be blunt with you -- I love singing along to the Beach Boys (sample lyric for young readers: "Nothing can touch my 409/409 oooooo/Giddy up giddy up 409,") but I am not a big fan of going to the beach.

This is because, physically, I resemble Poppin' Fresh, the Pillsbury Doughboy, in the sense that I'm puffy, pasty and ghostly white to the point where I can sustain a near-crippling sunburn simply by sitting in the den and watching a rerun of Lawrence of Arabia on our big-screen TV.

My wife is the opposite. She adores the beach. When she was young, instead of visiting Europe, she went to the South Seas. She has a permanent, year-round tan. On hot days, she used to slather herself with so much cocoa butter that if you tried to give her a hug, she'd squirt out of your arms and slither halfway across the yard.

So, after looking at the weekend forecast, she squealed: "Let's go to the beach!"

I squinted at her and squealed back: "No!"

"Fine," she sniffed, "we'll stay home and clean the gutters."

I squinted harder. "Can we get ice cream on the way to the beach?" I asked. She agreed, so we packed up. And when I say "packed up," I mean it literally. My wife doesn't just grab a bathing suit and drive to the beach. No, we had to scour our home and bring along a large percentage of our worldly goods, because who knows when you will need an old barbecue grill, maybe a suitcase to put shells into?

Once you are packed, the next step is getting to the beach. I'm not allowed to drive on the highway because my wife thinks -- "Ooooooh, that dog has a puffy tail!" -- I don't pay attention behind the wheel.

Instead, I operate the iPod and play a continuous selection of beach songs (sample lyric: SDLqLet's go surfin' now/Everybody's learning how/Come on and safari with me,") and operate the Emergency Passenger Brake, which involves me stomping on the floor of the car whenever I think my wife is driving too fast.

At the beach, the first thing you have to do is find an empty spot to plop all your stuff. You do this by staggering around all the sweaty bodies until you find an empty patch of sand that, by tradition, is located between a family with several unhappy babies and a gang of teenagers playing hip-hop music loud enough to shatter the windshield on your car.

The beach we picked was Patricia Beach. You should definitely go there. It's about an hour outside Winnipeg in a direction I don't remember. It's on this side of Lake Winnipeg, possibly the other side. You can't miss it.

It's what they call a family-friendly beach. You can always tell when you're at a family-friendly beach because most of the beach-goers will be smaller than canned hams with saggy disposable diapers peeking out from under their bathing suits.

As I basked in the sun, one of these diaper-clad munchkins waddled over on his stubby little legs, tiny beach shovel in hand and babbled at me in incoherent babyspeak.

"Aabudabbaududabbbadooog!" the little guy squawked.

"Aabudababagooodabagooble!" I burbled back. For you novice beach-goers, this is a no-no. If you engage a baby in conversation, it will automatically assume you understand what it is saying and for the rest of the day, when it's not mucking around in the sand, it will try to explain, in great detail, how it feels about current events.

To escape, you go in the water. This is another big mistake, because when you go in the water, you have to take your glasses off first, which means when you get out, you won't be able to see your wife or your massive pile of belongings.

Still, other than a sunburn, I survived our day at the beach. Now my wife is talking about taking a beach vacation.

"We should go to Hawaii!" she chirped on the drive home.

"Sure," I said, "I hear they have some great museums."

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 26, 2010 A2