Growing up in Titusville, Florida — a small city on Central Florida’s East Coast that’s known mostly as the place where the rockets go up — we didn’t always have much to do. What we did have was the beach.
And in high school, when my friends and I finally got our drivers’ licenses and access to a car, Cocoa Beach was our beach of choice.
Cocoa Beach was the cool beach. Cool because we had to drive 20 minutes out of town to get there, which our parents mostly forbade, and cool because it was where all the other teenagers in our town went to hang out. Some surfed, but we mostly just hung out by the Cocoa Beach Pier.
On weekends, my girlfriends and I would carpool together before 11 a.m., to beat the crowds. We’d lug our chairs, Coleman coolers filled with ice water and Publix-made subs (pub subs, if you’re a Floridian) through the sand, carefully choosing a spot near the pier for maximum sun exposure (note: not recommended). We’d sit and chitchat all day, watching the surfers, reapplying our sunscreen not nearly enough and slipping into the ocean once in a while to cool off. As the day wore on, we’d see friends turn up, turning our stretch of sand into our high-school version of Cheers, where everybody knew everybody. There was nothing else we’d rather do and nowhere else we’d rather be.
I haven’t been back to Cocoa Beach in a few years, but my hope is that it’s still the same. Friends sitting together on the beach, whiling the day away, talking about nothing and everything at the same time, and watching the surfers glide over the waves.