On the beach, part three

This is less of a narrative than a discussion on one facet of the beach trip. It's a big facet. It's drinking.

Drinking and the beach go together like salt and water. Don and I celebrated putting up the tent by cracking a beer. In fact, we celebrated every tent reopening with a beer. If we went into the water, usually due to consuming a solid quantity of beer, we had a beer. When it was time to eat lunch, we had a beer. At the end of the beach day, when we went to the room, we had blender drinks. Then we took either a blender drink or more beer to the grill as we cooked. It was one person's responsibility to watch the meat and the other's to go back upstairs and get more beer. After dinner, and maybe one more blender drink, we had one or two more beers. It's not surprising that we were asleep by ten o'clock on most nights.

If I drank this much at home, I'd be in some kind of 12-step program within a month. On the beach, it's par for the course. I invested well in my beer. Naturally I'm too much of a beer snob to buy Miller Lite. Once I'm on the beach, well, what happens on the beach stays on the beach. Except that I'm writing about it now. The reason why we drink Miller Lite during the day is that it's available in acceptable can format. This year, Don brought bottles. No one really cared as long as the bottles ended up in the trash and not ground into the sand.

My beach beer is Abita Strawberry. It's basically a lager with strawberry flavor. Does drinking flavored beer make me less of a man? Not if I drink a case of it. Yeah, that's the ticket. I also brought some of my favorite Corsendonk, but I didn't get around to it. Between the blender and the Miller Lite and the Abita and some Shiner I bought on a whim, we drank away the week.

I did a test tonight. I drank a beer with dinner. Yep, it's not the same as sitting on a reclining chair, listening to the surf.