The Night Before the Coast
The bags are by the front door, and I can’t sleep.
This post contains affiliate links. If you buy something through one, I may earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you. I only share things I genuinely use and love.
It’s here!!
The night before we leave for 30A never feels like a chore, even though it probably should. We’re cleaning the house and packing bags. Checking packing lists that I keep saved for every trip. Putting clean sheets on the bed — that’s a requirement. It will be the thing that cheers me up after leaving my favorite place on Earth. Half the house is in piles in the entryway — the kids’ things in one stack, ours in another, the beach towels and bags stacked up like a colorful rainbow. Skim boards and boogie board leaned against the wall. I keep finding reasons to walk through the house. Check the thermostat. Water the hydrangeas and hostas one more time so they make it the week we’re gone. Give Lincoln and Penny endless snuggles — they’re staying home this time, and it’s the one thing putting a damper on the anticipation. Leaving will have a bittersweetness to it as we say goodbye to them, but it’s 11:00 at night, and nothing can really take away the sweetness of my excitement. I’m wide awake — the good kind of awake, not the annoying perimenopause awake, the kind you feel as a little girl counting down to something.
What Goes in the Bag
There’s a particular order to it now. The linen first — the white cami, the chambray, the pieces that don’t wrinkle in a way that matters — the things I’ll basically live in for a week. Then the striped mug, which I wrap in a beach towel and wedge where nothing can shift onto it. Morning coffee tastes different out of the wrong cup, and I am not interested in finding that out at the beach. A novel I’ve been saving — this year it’s The Sisters of Blue Mountain Beach. Sunscreen, Cool Down, the wide hat. Every swimsuit in my wardrobe. Maxi dresses and my favorite beach sweater, the cream one from J. Crew that I’ve been wearing since the first time we took the kids to the beach.
The Sisters of Blue Mountain Beach by Kalan Chapman LLoyd
What doesn’t go is the part I look forward to most. The laptop stays home. The running list of next things — the one that lives behind my eyes most weeks — stays home too. For a few days, the only schedule is the tide.
The Early Drive
We leave before the sun wakes. The car gets loaded in the dark while I make my coffee in a travel mug, and the kids stumble out half-asleep in comfy jammies. For the first couple of hours nobody says much of anything. We put on quiet music and let the highway do its work. Texas goes flat and brown and endless for a long while. The sun comes up, the light changes, and suddenly there’s a new energy in the car. We fuel up on donuts and breakfast and the playlist changes. We’re singing at the top of our lungs like we’re in a karaoke contest and the anticipation for where we’re headed is palpable.
Eventually the singing contest gives way to an audiobook and the kids and I drift in and out of sleep as the minutes tick down on our ten-hour drive.
We honk as we cross each state line — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. The glimpses of water along the way only increase our excitement and decrease our patience. And then it happens. We cross into Florida, and that state line gets an extra long honk.
The air through the cracked window turns soft and salt-warm. Somebody in the back seat sits up. We can feel the coast before we can see it.
And then, there it is. The water opens up all at once, that expansive, bright, unhurried blue that doesn’t look real for the first second you see it. We’ve made this drive enough times that I know exactly which curve it comes on. I still hold my breath for it.
Why I Pack the Night Before
I could pack a week ahead of time or in the wee hours of the morning, but the night before is its own small ceremony. The house gone quiet, the bags lined up at the door, the whole slow week still ahead of me and not one hour of it spent yet. That’s the part I’d never trade. The trip hasn’t started, and somehow it already has.
We’ll be on the shore before dinner time. Sandy feet will walk into the house tonight. I’ll take my coffee on the beach in my favorite mug in the morning. And that’s really all I packed for.
