The sun shone through the windshield of the Toyota pickup, warming the vinyl seats and letting us roll the windows down. Somewhere around Florence, we hung our arms out on the sides and cranked up the radio. Turning on to a side street from the four-lane, we honed in on our condo in the hide-and-seek days before the Global Positioning System. Looking down a side street, I saw a blue wall that rose to the line of the cottage roofs. It took a second to realize that this was the ocean. Prior to that, I had only seen the Gulf of Mexico which for some reason seemed flatter.
Pensacola was no Myrtle Beach. There were girls in Myrtle Beach. College girls in bikinis. The real action was farther south, down in Florida where it was close to hot in March. Here it was just passing warm enough to take your shirt off. Not that I would be taking my shirt off. Or talking to girls. I could not even get the gumption up to smoke in front of my brother, thinking that he would care. This had the potential to be the longest Spring Break of my life.
The main drag in Myrtle Beach is straight out of “Forth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” by Bruce Springsteen. Neon lights, old school arcades, and bumper to bumper traffic of kids looking at each other while not looking at each other. Cruising in a blue Toyota pickup with a bumper sticker from a bookstore on the back is probably not going to get you much of anywhere. At that point I was just glad to be where I was. This was as over the top as I had seen outside of Gatlinburg.
We ate fried seafood one night and played numerous rounds of put-put. We talked to two girls, but not for very long. We listened to the Surf Punks, who really really suck unless you are at the beach in a vehicle with the windows down. On the whole, this was not my kind of place, but for a week it was nice not to be me. Spring Break, it turns out, was way too short.