No Florida vacation: Growing up by the Gulf

When I talk about the various places I'm from, the place I tend to talk about the least is St. Petersburg, Florida - but if we're friends on Facebook, it's documented there. I graduated from St. Petersburg Catholic High School, St. Petersburg Junior College, and the University of South Florida's St. Petersburg campus; one reason I chose to major in accounting was because I could get all the classes I needed without ever having to drive over to the main campus in Tampa. And every place I've lived has been fairly close to a body of water - Long Island Sound, Cayuga Lake, the Mississippi River, the Pacific Ocean - but St. Pete is surrounded by it, with Tampa Bay to the east and the Gulf of Mexico on the west.

The Gulf is in the news and on a lot of people's minds lately. I left Florida after college and have never had any desire to live there again - I still don't. There's not much I miss about it, to be honest. However, one of the things I do miss is the Gulf of Mexico, whose beaches absolutely spoiled me rotten for the ten years I lived near them. Since leaving Florida's Suncoast, I've never wanted to swim anywhere except in a pool.

The sands of the western Florida peninsula are perhaps a little less soft and white than those a little further north in the Panhandle, but they are very nice all the same, and the smooth surface under the water lets you walk out into it a long way. The Gulf waters are close to perfect in temperature year-round - rarely too cold, as comfortable as bathwater most of the time, and usually cooler than the air outside - and close to shore, they're generally fairly calm. Because of that, it's not an ideal place to surf, but the swimming and snorkeling are great. Sadly, if you live near them, you probably don't take advantage of that year-round, though; at least, people didn't when I lived there. Going to the beach in the winter - "snowbird season," or the period from November to March that passes for winter in the Tampa Bay area - meant that you risked looking like a tourist, and no self-respecting Floridian would want to be the object of that particular mistake.

But as we've seen for the last several weeks, there are far worse mistakes that can happen in the Gulf of Mexico.

I don't miss Florida's humid heat, or flat terrain, or mosquitoes (and especially not the giant cockroaches), but I do miss the Gulf beaches. The Pacific coast is more majestic, but far less inviting - it's colder in every way. "Going to the beach" still means places like Fort DeSoto and St. Pete Beach to me, and even though I've been away from them for over twenty years, I wonder if it always will. I wonder what they'll be like if I ever go back to them. I wonder what they'll be like even later this summer, and if the oil will creep ever closer and change them forever.

This post is part of the Love the Gulf Blog Carnival hosted by Deb on the Rox, Morningside Mom, and Mommy Melee.

Image Credits: Fort DeSoto Park/Pinellas County Parks & Recreation