Beach Person vs. Travel Person

What kind of vacationer are you?

The way things can have different names depending on what area of the country you are in has always fascinated me. Soda or pop. Shopping cart or buggy. Sneakers or tennis shoes.

My first real-life encounter with this was when I was a freshman in college. I asked my roommate (who was from Maryland) if she wanted to go get some barbecue. As a lifelong North Carolinian, barbecue has always been a noun to me—pulled pork soaked in vinegar-based sauce, often piled high on a bun with coleslaw on top and golden-fried hush puppies on the side.

For my roommate, however, barbecue was a verb. “Barbecued what?” she asked me.

“Just… barbecue,” I said back, looking at her in complete confusion. After an amusing barbecue-themed version of “Who’s on First,” I realized that to her, barbecue was the equivalent of grilling out—hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill.

Later on, when I got married, I realized that this kind of confusion doesn’t only apply to regional differences. It also applies to things like what you mean when you say, “Let’s go on vacation.”

North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores

In my mind, vacation meant travel. I grew up in a family where my dad’s lifelong goal was to see all fifty states.¹ My childhood vacations were spent traveling somewhere different each year, steadily marking states off the list.² We visited the places you’d expect, big tourist destinations, like the Grand Canyon, New York City, and Disney World, but we also went to smaller, more off-the-beaten-path destinations. When I’d tell my friends we’d gone on vacation to Red Lodge, Montana, or Branson, Missouri, they’d say, “Where?” and look at me in confusion.

My husband, on the other hand, grew up in a beach family. For him, vacation has always meant a week at the beach, with no plans other than spending all day in the sun.

Angel's Share Cafe in Beaufort, North Carolina

This posed a problem when we started discussing vacation plans. He wanted to go to the beach; I wanted to travel.

It’s not that I don’t like the beach. I love the beach! But my experience of the beach was that it was a weekend or day trip destination (I’ve always lived just a few hours from the coast). I frequently went on church youth group trips or college retreats to the beach growing up and always had a great time. It just wasn’t where I thought about spending a whole entire week.

Vacation, I argued for the first few years of our marriage, is supposed to be for seeing somewhere new. There are so many places I want to see, and spending a whole week at the beach when we could go out and explore the world seemed wasteful, somehow.

But then, the pandemic happened. Desperate for a change of scenery, in the fall of 2020, we booked a beach house at Emerald Isle—the same beach my husband grew up going to.

We enjoyed it so much that we booked the same house in the spring of 2021. And then, for spring break in 2022… and every spring break since.

I still want to travel and see the world. I want to take my kids to all the places and see all the things. But I’ve come to realize that maybe there’s room for both.

There’s something special about going back to the same place, year after year. My kids love the familiarity of knowing we’ll go to the aquarium and see the otters, we’ll take a day to walk around Beaufort, and we’ll stop by The Sweet Spot for ice cream. And as my children grow older and taller, I cherish the moments when memories wash up on the shore like shells on the sand; precious glimpses of younger versions of my boys frolicking through waves and building sandcastles that will wash away with the tide.

1. I’m happy to report my dad did make it to all fifty states, checking the last three (Alaska, Washington, and Oregon) off his list just a few months before he passed away in 2014.

2. As a result, I’ve visited thirty-seven states. I’d like to make it to all fifty, too!