This is an excerpt from a larger list, where I give various activities a Sober Fun rating of 1-10. Entries from this list are scattered throughout my website, or you can find that complete list HERE.

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GOING TO THE BEACH: 5

“Pro” is a bit of stretch, don’t you think, guys? Maybe it was meant to be facetious, but they suited me up in a rubber outfit that said “Dive Pro,” like I had the first clue what I was doing. I wish I could have covered it up with one of those driver’s ed bumper stickers that said something like, “Caution: Student Diver, Don’t Follow Me Too Closely.”

Oh -- unless of course you’re following me because you know I’ll likely need saving soon...seeing as how I’ve mostly only ever been SNORKELING before... then you can follow me.

This is a bit of a bait and switch here, because although in the photo I’m dressed for SCUBA DIVING, I’m really going to talk about Going to the Beach, and maybe a bit about snorkeling, too.

Going to the beach is one of those activities (much like snorkeling) where the activity itself is relatively cheap and easy, but is only enjoyable if you first spend thousands and thousands of dollars to get somewhere really awesome and beautiful.

By necessity, my parents raised us to be ski people, not beach people. With the family NURSERY BUSINESS, spring is our busiest season, so a vacation of any kind during this most pleasant of seasons was/is always out of the question. And by the time things slow down in the later summer months, the sweltering Texas heat has set in, and the idea of going from hot-ass Texas to a hot-as-balls beach was understandably never something my parents found appealing. A springtime beach might be amazing, but we would never know.

We once had to go to Galveston for one of my piano competitions. It was late August, temperatures stayed above 100° F, and the entire coastal city smelled like dead fish. It smelled like the scorching Texas sun was just boiling them alive in the ocean and wafting a nauseating death stench across the entire town. My parents thought maybe my brother and I would like to snorkel while we were there, but after hearing them say that it was dead fish making that horrendous smell, I had no interest. The idea of getting in the ocean with all the fish corpses and then viewing them through goggles sounded repulsive.

Similarly, as an adult I took a road trip to Florida with some friends and found out too late that their idea of fun was to get multiple 12-packs and then just sit at the beach all day. Sit at the beach all day and do… nothing. Just drink beers in the hot sun and watch the ocean. There were unbearable masses of people all sitting around, crowded together on the beach and facing the same direction; like a show was about to start or something was about to happen, but nothing ever did. The event was just the ocean itself. I was always more of a high-functioning, high-energy alcoholic (the cocaine might have helped with this) and so that sort of thing didn’t really work for me. I needed to be actively doing something.

That much hasn’t changed, which is why I somewhat reluctantly even added “Going to the Beach” to my list. I didn’t like it then, and sober, I still don’t like it now.

So, no beaches for me, unless it is somewhere private and exotic. After visiting Super Paradise Beach in Greece, I was surprised to learn that I do like certain beaches, so long as they are breathtakingly beautiful and are devoid of people. Ideally, I like:

1. a dense tropical forest growing all around me

2. a beach with no more than ten people (not including the waitstaff)

3. somewhere in my visual sightline, waves crashing onto rocks

4. Ooh! And also maybe a waterfall or two

5. And maybe lots of animals would also be nice, preferably exotic ones... If they are species I’ve never seen before, then that could keep me entertained for the day, especially if the people I’m with intend to just sit and drink beers for hours and hours...

6. But hold on, if there are exotic animals all around me, then I’d want my photo gear with me, and now this has turned into something other than a day at the beach.

Never mind, I’m still not a beach person.

You’d think that having an activity to keep me busy, such as snorkeling might change things, but I feel the same way about snorkeling as I do about beaches: that unless I am somewhere truly beautiful and guaranteed that there are going to be plenteous amounts of gorgeous underwater ecosystems for me to view, then I’m probably not interested. I don’t want to go to some crowded local beach and put on goggles and a snorkel just look at murky seaweed tangled around human detritus. Did someone's hair extensions just float past me?

However, let’s assume all my conditions have been met, and we are somewhere magnificent and gorgeous, with all sorts of fish and coral to look at, well…. now we’re talking! That’s just basically an underwater SAFARI, so of course, I’m in. And it’s much cheaper and more easily accomplished than SCUBA DIVING, too!

So, to recap: Snorkeling (after all conditions have been met like, say, for example, my experience off the coast of Thailand) gets a Sober Fun rating of 7, I could do it all day long, and you can read more about that HERE.

Just provided there is a break for lunch, and that lunch is not fish. That’s too much of a bait and switch even for me, it just seems wrong. To come and watch these creatures all day long, living happily in their homes, like we are just gracious visitors here to passively observer them… but then turn around and eat them for lunch?

No. If I want to enjoy dead fish in their natural habitat, I’ll go to Galveston.

And oh yeah, before I forget: going to the beach and doing nothing gets a Sober Fun rating of 5. And the rating is only that high provided everyone agrees that you’re only going to do it for about an hour, then you can all leave the beach and go do something real.