My beach, where I grew up

(This post was inspired by Evil Genius Chronicles, Lunches at the Beach.)

I grew up in this very town, 37 miles west of San Juan on the north shore of Puerto Rico. This very house where I live now was my grandfather’s house when I was eight years old. It later became my home, from ages 11 to 17. After graduating from high school, I went to Pennsylvania, PA to study Computer Science and got a job straight out of college. I moved here again almost seven years ago, when the dot com bust left me looking for a job.

I live 5 minutes from the beach, a beautiful bay, in my not so humble opinion.

I loved the beach growing up. I visited the beach every chance I got, even though I didn’t learn to swim properly till I was 16 years old. I just liked to walk the beach, sink my toes in the warm sand, or chill my feet in the water. And my beach has these great hulks of stone nearly three stories high (eolianite according to this page .) I loved climbing them and sitting at the very top and just stare out over the endless stretch of the north Atlantic on the horizon. At different times of the week, you can see the cruise ships heading for the Bahamas or Florida, just a half mile or so from the rocks.

As mentioned at the beginning, after I graduated high school I studied and worked in southeastern Pennsylvania and the North Carolina piedmont for 13 years, several hundred miles from the nearest beach. You can’t imagine the joy I felt every time I returned home on vacation to visit family during those years and stopped to visit this beach. I’m sorry, eastern USA residents, but your beaches are lame. And don’t even get me started about Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. Psh!

For the last two years, I’ve been working from home as a freelance software developer and tech writer. I pretty much can keep my own hours and so I make a point of taking an hour break at least twice in my work week, to head to my beach, just 5 short miles away. There are times I just take the whole weekend away from computers, work, everything (except my iPod and my fiction reading stash.) Sometimes I feel so burned out I just sleep all day on a hammock, less than twenty yards from the breaking waves. The sound of the waves and the steady cool breeze lulls me to sleep every time.

Every year since I moved back here, I ask myself if I want to move back to the USA mainland. And this beach is one of the few reasons I’ve stayed as long as I have.