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Before having a child, my wife and I had always prided ourselves on being travelers and not tourists. We liked out-of-the-way places; my research often took us to absurd locations like the Democratic Republic of Congo near rebel-held territory or old Khmer Rouge bases on the Thai-Cambodian border. We hated anything that smelled of a prepaid vacation package and we generally avoided hotels, preferring guesthouses or staying in locals’ apartments.

Yet as soon as the baby arrived, our concept of an ideal vacation underwent a complete inversion. I’m not sure what happened; even now I’m embarrassed to recount how quickly we undermined all of our rules for travel. I remember sitting in our living room two winters ago, shivering in our long underwear and sweaters that smelled vaguely of day-old baby vomit and staring longingly at pictures of all-inclusive resorts that once upon a time would have caused us to break out in hives. It was almost hormonal, the urgency with which we were drawn to a place where you essentially beach yourself like a lost whale. But we would not be dissuaded; we were determined to get a little heat on the epidermis and so, as the East Coast was locked in the grip of a particularly ferocious and unrelenting winter, we flew with our 3-month-old son, Holt, to Central Florida. It was our first trip with the babe and we were, in a word, terrified.

As it turned out, that weekend in Clearwater Beach was one of the best of our lives, perhaps because it also coincided with Holt waking up to the particulars of the world, as babies often do around three months. You could see it in his eyes. He blinked, as if to say, “Oh, so this is where I am. O.K. — I can work with this.” A part of me felt bad that he was coming into consciousness poolside, surrounded by overweight and sunburned Americans lightly drooling to Jimmy Buffett tunes, but hey — the world ain’t all pretty, kid.

We stayed at the Sheraton Sand Key Resort on a little spit of white sand overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. As is customary at these types of places, we didn’t do anything. I put Holt in a fancy sling contraption and shuffled him from the pool to the beach and then back to the pool. When Mom took him, I found myself desperate to feel like an adult again, even if only for an hour. Strange that adulthood equated to collecting about three towels too many from the towel boy, then elbowing my way to a prime spot on the deck so that I could slurp an overpriced piña colada and roast my pasty flesh while staring at the same page of a book for 20 minutes. And you know what? It was awesome.


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