Log A Few Miles Anywhere

Home Sweet Home.  My parents retired to Melbourne Beach, Florida 18 years ago.  While I grew up in Illinois, I still consider my parent’s house “home”.  It’s comfortable; and when I am “home”, my mom cooks and does my laundry.  It gives me warm fuzzies.

Beach walking is one of my favorite things to do while I am visiting my parents.  The beach is a three minute walk from their house so it’s easy to get there.  It’s private beaches for miles and miles so I rarely see more than a couple of people.  I can walk for miles without getting tired and still feel refreshed every step of the way.  Beach walking makes me happy for two reasons: it’s great exercise in a beautiful setting and it gives me a chance to think about things from the past in a positive manner.  If I am walking alone, I bring music and spend time singing and smiling.  One of my favorite beach walking songs is Luke Bryan’s That’s My Kind of Night. It makes me want to skip down the beach when I listen to it! I am always in a good mood when I come back from a beach walk.

I also love to beach walk with my husband Nick.  Together for more than four years, we were attracted to each other initially because we both live an active lifestyle with a lot of time outdoors.  We go for a lot of walks in Northern California and we have logged many miles walking along the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean beaches together!  When we were on our honeymoon in Europe, we also did a lot of beach walking.  We found some amazing sea glass in Croatia!

Through the years, I have done a lot of personal and work travel. Long ago, I developed the habit of getting up early, lacing up my sneakers and going for a long run while I was out of town.  And now that I have gotten older, it’s a long walk. It’s free and I see a lot of things I wouldn’t see if I was in a car, bus or  train.  A long time ago a friend of mine gave me a Nike poster that said “The Roads Are Always Free”.  I love that!

In April we went to my parent’s house for a few days.  The first thing my husband did when we walked down to the ocean was run into the water – he loves it.  After a nurse shark swam within 3 feet near us last summer in that same area, I am not a big fan of swimming in the ocean these days.

My mom got me hooked on looking for sea glass at the beach too. In April we went out for a beach walk with my mom and after a lot of looking, we found two pieces of sea glass.  Finding sea glass in Melbourne Beach isn’t easy because there aren’t a lot of shells on the beach. Because I like to search for sea glass, I try to time my walks based on low tide. Thank goodness for Google search because it’s easy to do that using tables like this one.

But even if you don’t live a block from the ocean, going out for a walk can be refreshing for the soul.  The hardest part of exercise for many of us is the first step out the door!  It’s a place you can disconnect from the internet, your phone, email and enjoy the fresh air.  Be inspired! Put on your running or walking shoes today, get out there and see a little part of your world!  Breath in the fresh air and think positive!

Since the invention of social media in the last few years, I love to take a few photos of the great outdoors.  I’ll close with a few of the beautiful pictures I took recently while beach walking at my parent’s house in mid-October.   

The last picture of the blog is from an October sunset at the beach.  It was so pretty, even the jellyfish stopped to admire it!