Tagged: anguilla, beach, caribbean, travel
If you’ve been following my blog at all for these last few months, you’ll know I’ve become smitten with Anguilla. Travel is in my blood and visiting a new Caribbean island each year has been a goal of mine for the past decade. Every time I think back about our 48 hours in Anguilla, though, that goal is happily tossed to the side like a used up bottle of tonic water and the only travelling I want to do is back to the white sand beaches of Meads Bay or to Sandy Ground to enjoy some drinks at sunset with our newest friends. Not a day passes that I don’t daydream about how to get back there sooner rather than later and to hopefully one day call it home. If I could just figure out how to make it A LOT cheaper and open a new beach bar with absolutely zero capital, I’d be on the next plane south.
View from Blanchard’s Beach Shack, Meads Bay, Anguilla.
So what brought on the Anguilla acclamation on a day normally reserved for an Instagram post? Well, two things. First, not enough people are using the #beachbarbums tag in their posts so I don’t have the material (I’m offering free stuff if you use it – what’s a guy gotta do?!). Second, and more importantly, I had a short conversation with a fellow travel/rum blogger and I noted how much I loved his adopted hometown. He mentioned that he had first visited in the 90s and ended up moving there permanently 14 years after his first visit. I don’t know how many return trips occurred between the first visit and the last permanent one but the point is that even though it took him 14 years, he eventually made a place he fell in love with on vacation his home. And that gives me hope. It may take four years, 14 years or 24 years but if one of my visits to Anguilla turns into an indefinite one, I hope you all come down and visit for a while and buy a lot of food and drinks at my beach bar because Anguilla isn’t cheap and a guy’s gotta eat. As much as I hate to admit it, we can’t live on rum alone … although that won’t stop some of us from trying.
Some people are just born or raised in the wrong region. It happens to be the place their family chose to call home and before they know it, their roots have been established and moving is out of the question for the moment. My friend’s story gives me hope, however, and is a nice reminder on a gray Monday that one of these days, the beach will be home and my roots will be dug into the whitest rum soaked sand you’ve ever seen.
Have you found your permanent vacation? If so, what convinced you to finally make the move? Give me some hope and let me know that it will be well worth the wait.
“And that slow, crooked, seemingly aimless path of our lives at the beach may just be getting us closer and closer to our best selves.” Sandy Gingras from her book, “How to Live at the Beach”
