This week, I had a really grueling bike ride on Zwift, so I thought I would take a day off and go for a walk instead of running.  The weather was warm, so  I thought walking to the beach would be fun.  I ended up walking about 10 miles, so it wasn’t quite the rest day I intended.

In my wandering around, I managed to circumvent security and end up on a private beach.  Totally not my intent, but the beach is much nicer than the public beach for sure.   The private beach was filled with people in the water as well as sunbathing.  Interestingly enough, once I walked back to the public beach, I saw that there were hazard flags- rip tide and strong current.  No one was in the water, though plenty of people were laying out.  So if you are on the private part of the beach, you have no information about the dangers.

One other thing that I noticed is that I started coughing the minute I hit the beach and I noticed quite a few others coughing as well.  I had thought that respiratory distress only occurred during serious red-tide blooms, but apparently not.  In fact, one of the beach status report fields is how many coughs and sneezes are heard within a 30-second window.  (Yesterday morning’s value was “slight”, with only a few coughs heard by the evaluator.  I would say it was higher than that by the time I got there mid-afternoon.)

The walk was pleasant.  Even before you get to the beach, most of the walk is adjacent to the water.  There are small strips of park/ beach between the main road and the water, so you can stop and watch the waves on the way.