The Summer Vacation

By Laura Forrest Hopfauf

The first time my parents took me to the Atlantic Ocean I was young enough that I hadn’t started school yet. We went to Assateague Island and camped in a tent along the seashore. I don’t recall much from that trip. I most remember a storm coming in off the water to blast sand against my face with such force that I closed my eyes so long and tight that I fell asleep on the beach. 

Usually, people aren’t drawn to places that throw sand in their eyes, but for me that was the start of a love affair. 

Almost every summer, my parents and I would make the supposed four-hour drive–but let’s be honest with traffic and the Bay Bridge to get to the shores of the Atlantic it’s usually somewhere right under six–to Assateague Island. We’d unload our car, carrying camping gear up and down the sand, set up our tent, and call ourselves home for the week. We didn’t do much. We’d stay at the beach until we were baked. We’d hit the trails covered with enough DEET that I’m sure we were on the verge of a toxicity issue, but at least we weren’t getting bit by the hundreds of mosquitos that seemed to swarm whenever we left the coast. We’d watch the horses and comb the beach for washed up treasure.  

By the time I left for college I’d been to Assateague enough times that I should have been over it.  

But I wasn’t.  

In the beginning of our relationship, I took my would-be husband camping at Assateague during a record heat weekend. He had never been. The temperature got well above 100 for hours during the day, didn’t dip below 90 at night. We were constantly hot and fighting off mosquitos. Again, it didn’t seem like this was the kind of place he was going to fall in love either with after being roasted and then eaten alive. But he did. 

During the early years of our marriage, we ran to Assateague often. We were drowning in student loan debt, working round the clock, but we could get to the island relatively quickly, camp for next to nothing, and be in the wild with all we could eat seafood buffets and mini-golf and bars less than a half hour away in Ocean City.  

But even though we were going to the same place time and time again, even multiple times in the same season, it was never the same spot, and it was never the same vacation.  

We had weekends where the weather was perfect, and we never wanted to leave the beach. We had a trip where we were hit with thunderstorms so bad that our tent collapsed in on itself while we were sleeping inside it. The wind beat the side walls off of me like I was stuck inside a drum. We had rain and meteor showers and even saw snow during the winter. It was like every time we went, even to the same spot, it was somewhere new. 

Our daughters aren’t in school yet, and the oldest two have already been to Assateague multiple times. They like the horses, but more than anything they like the beach. They want to stay there forever. 

And that’s the beauty of vacations.  

It doesn’t matter that we go to the same spot with the same people and drive the same car every year. When we’re on vacation we step out of our daily life into the time we dream we had every day. The time to do what we want, when we want, to take time doing nothing but seeing each other and where we are. On vacation the same old spot can be new again because we give ourselves the time to see it with fresh eyes.  

I’ve seen Assateague more times than I can count, but this year, once again on our yearly vacation, it’ll be new.