In no particular order of importance because none of them are ultimately important… except perhaps the very last one.
Toddlers love to repeat things. "Welcome to the beach; don't be a beach!" I sung on finding a little painted sign above the toilet welcoming me for my post-trip pee. My mom was not thrilled when the toddler started saying the last part or modifying it to just call people and things "beach".
K-pop is manufactured ear-nicotine. My niece recently turned ten, and her current life soundtrack is basically that of this summer's animated K-pop movie. This would be fine except that starting on the ride down there, these songs were stuck in my head all week long. I read about its soundtrack, and they specifically wanted songs that would do this, and they succeeded bigly in these efforts.
While sunbeams, and thus the UV light waves they carry, may or may not go through metal screens on porches, they certainly do go through tents and umbrellas. It's possible to be pale enough to get sunburned in the shade. I'd say "Ask me how I know," but it should be obvious from me writing this at all that it happened. Again.
The profits stores make selling ice cream are insane. Six dollars for two scoops? Ten for a milkshake?! I don't know if every ice cream store can flourish, but in the right place it seems like a dead-simple business opportunity to rake in buckets of cash. You can even save money by hiring all those Russian immigrants who live at the beach for who knows what reason. Do I want to know why they're present in such numbers? Kinda. Do I think it could be sinister? Also kinda.
I could read a lot more than I currently do. While not even trying particularly hard to accomplish it, I managed to read three novels of decreasing length within a week: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and Glimmer by Annie Waters. (No Wikipedia article exists for it or the author as they're apparently not important enough.) I never ended up reading on the beach (under a tent) as I thought I would, and I didn't read in the car on the outbound and return trips. I'm not a fast reader by any means, preferring to play things out in my head in a film-like manner, and I spent plenty of time not reading. Yet I was still able to knock out three books in the time it normally takes me to get through a fraction of a single book by only reading before bed. I should really carve out time each day to read…
Rumors and gossip exist because people don't want to think about their own lives and get sad. It's a simple and effective way to focus on someone else's issues and feel better about oneself. I may be wildly out of shape, but did you see the state of so-and-so's face? It's horrible! Are they on drugs? Focus on the external and ignore the internal: it's one path toward happiness. Or at least a path toward not-sadness-at-the-current-moment.
Fit muscle-bound girls are in. Thongs are out. I distinctly remember remarking on all the "whole butt" girls, those who were wearing thongs and displaying their entire butt to the world, a few years back. This year? Those girls were a rarity. Adjacent lesson: Guys shaped like triangles get all the muscle-bound bikini-wearing girls.
There are roaches everywhere there are humans. This includes the beach. I learned this because some big ones started coming up onto the screened porch by climbing up through the deck boards at night while we sat out there thinking ourselves protected from bugs. We couldn't find any bug spray, so I doused them with disinfectant spray. I saw one inside the house the next night that crawled under the cabinet where the TV sat, but I didn't alert anyone or try to vacuum it because I was the only one not in bed at the time. The night after that? I turned the light on in the bedroom I was inhabiting and saw that fucker standing on a pillow on my bed. He climbed onto the headboard, and then he got vacuumed up with a notable clunk through the hose. I had to sleep in that bed the rest of the week; the couch wouldn't work because it was too close to my parents' room, and my mom snores like a chainsaw.
"R" and "F" are very difficult sounds for toddlers. Boys like "wiretwucks" and call otters "woxes", and it's up to you to decipher what the hell they're trying to say by substituting other sounds for any particular W sound they make. I don't think he ever saw them, but there'd have been "woaches" afoot had he been out on the porch on certain nights.
The sun rises too damned early. The earliest I got up during this beach week was 6:45. Much to my annoyance, the sun was still fully above the ocean horizon at that time.
Albino (or at least leucistic) alligators exist! There's also a 152,000-acre refuge for alligators (in general, not just white ones) just off of Roanoke Island that you can drive through. It's not paved, so it takes a long time if you want to go through the whole thing.
Screen addiction is a real thing, and kids are demonstrably dumber now than they were when we millennials were growing up. Boomers aren't immune either, and I've seen notable changes in my parents since they got iPhones a decade or more ago. My dad was sucked rightward politically into supporting Trump, and my mom doesn't understand that Facebook is an endless stream of ads, misinformation, and scams. For instance, everything on Facebook is a "toxin" or "toxic", and so this year's beach trip was filled with "natural" sunscreen that contained gross and smelly things like beef tallow.
Foosball is very hard and clumsy, but it's mostly only ever played by drunk people, so it doesn't matter.
Those little beigeish sand crabs are not hard to catch with a short net. Catch-and-release is kinda cruel, though. If you're gonna scare a wild animal into fearing for its life, you might as well put him out of his misery and cook him up. Crabs will tear off their own limbs when they feel cornered and think it might help them escape. Quit fucking with the animals!
Sandflies are a creation of Satan. Their bites itch for far longer than mosquitoes, and they make anxiety-prone people wonder if they've been implanted by a botfly and will soon be getting eaten by worms.
Screaming toddlers will stop an entire store or restaurant full of people and draw their attention. My nephew is not what you might call a listener, and he had two breakdowns in public after not getting his way. I don't know how one is supposed to reason with a small human incapable of understanding cause and effect, but I'm glad I don't have any kids myself.
I will always either burn my mouth on coffee or bust a toe while I'm at the beach. There isn't a year that's gone by since we started going back some eight years ago that one or both hasn't happened. I did both this year. Our first year back I broke two toes and hobbled around for days with purple appendages. How did I break them, you ask? Well, I kicked a wall. And I kicked a wall because I was trying to scrape sand off the bottom of my left foot by rubbing it on top of the right. I pressed down too hard and my foot launched forward into pain. I could've bent over slightly and brushed the sand away with a hand, but I was being lazy and paid the price.
Just pay the $9 toll for the direct route to the coast. I know it's an absurd price, but it's a twice-a-year expenditure. Navigating your way through back roads and landing in traffic with all the other toll avoiders is simply not worth it.
My orange cats will never not hate being in the car. This is the third time I've dropped them off with a friend for a beach week, and they hate being driven around. Merry in particular, the overweight girl cat, yowls at me the whole time while trying to bite and claw her way out. Pippin is at risk of doing a poop mid-trip if it's long enough, forcing me to nearly hang my head out the lowered window to escape the smell. He's 50/50 so far, I believe.
There are some effects on the sinuses going from air that's constantly water-logged to 70-80% to that with normal humidity levels around 50%. Waking up since the beach has left me with bloody nose blowing. Gross. Beach humidity never ends unless you're in a more modern house with a good HVAC system and solid insulation ⸺ which includes its windows. Old beachfront houses are not like this.
Few of us need to be so connected to the internet. I purposefully avoided screens for the most part this week. It's part of why I was able to finish three books. RSS feeds unviewed. YouTube subscriptions unwatched. reddit posts unvoted. Bluesky feeds unscrolled. You're accomplishing nothing while sitting there scrolling. No amount of tweeting about the evils of politicians will hold them accountable for their sins. No amount of double-tapping short-form videos will change your life or make you happy. The AP was still pushing me notices, so I wasn't completely unaware of the world, and that was enough.