The trip to Vero Beach took us through a narrow channel surrounded by spoil islands and shoals – in places the water was only inches deep right up to the edge of the channel – but it was a pretty trip. We topped off our fuel before pulling into our slip, and the first thing we did ashore was walk over to the beach. It felt so good to have sand between my toes again and to walk in the crystal blue water. We even managed to find coconut palms (decorated with garland candy canes, no less!). We stopped in at the Sailfish Brewing Company taproom and tried a few of their beers – I’m not usually big into sours, but their holiday sour was really solid – and we had dinner at the Riverside Cafe, where we caught I think our third football game of the season (ironically, two were Bucs games and the other one was some game I didn’t really care about, but it was on… not a single Pats game this season!).
Most mornings, we walked over to the beach, and on our first morning walk, we saw a rainbow. We got off-and-on showers all day, but the upside was that we got a gorgeous, intense rainbow at sunset too. We had breakfast at a beachfront restaurant one morning, and it felt like being on vacation in the tropics as the wind rustled through the palms. On one of our beach walks, we did a bit of a clean-up, but I was a little less diligent than usual – there were lots of little Portuguese man o’ war jellies, mostly tiny, washed up and mixed in among the seaweed and plastics. Another morning, we took a dinghy cruise through the mangroves and had a dolphin surface just a few feet away from us.
I took a day to go Target and pick up a few things we needed, and I found us a cheesy little fake Christmas tree. I completely failed at finding lights, but the tree was at least a start, and I picked up some eggnog too. We were visited by kayaking carolers (all of their kayaks were decorated with lights), and with all of that, it started to feel a little like the holidays.
Vero Beach has earned the nickname “Velcro Beach”, and with good reason. Originally we were going to move on to Stuart next, but we decided we loved it here so much that we’d stay and stage for our hop to the Bahamas, so we’ll be moving out to a mooring. This way, we can order things we need and have them shipped to the marina, and run last-minute errands. Plus, we can hang out at the beach! Since we won’t be moving on the weekend, we also were able to go get our Covid boosters (fortunately neither of us had any side-effects), and while we were at CVS, I managed to find a little string of battery-operated lights for our tree. Later, we watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, a bit of a tradition, and this time Chris subjected himself willingly.
