Daytona Beach - Orlando / Florida Guide
Florida Guide > Days Out
“Turn right. You' ve got six miles of beach to park on”, said the parking attendant. Where were we? Daytona Beach. So we turned right onto the fine, pale sand that stretched before us under the morning sun.
With the car parked, and our towels laid out on the sand, we looked at the Atlantic Ocean. A pelican flew past, and some turnstones and dunlins scurried along the shoreline.
It was time to test the waters, so we walked slowly into the cool Atlantic as more pelicans flew overhead. My wife spotted a fin breaking the surface a hundred yards out. It was a dolphin. Then we saw a pair of them! We waited for more, and were rewarded with the sight of them leaping out of the ocean and slapping their tails on the water. They eventually moved away, so we went back to our towels.
The beach is so flat that it was used for races for over 50 years. The winner of the first reached a dizzying speed of 57 miles per hour! But we decided to use the sand to build a sand castle. Our efforts were a race against the incoming tide. We' d just finished and taken a couple of pictures when a wave demolished the front of our edifice.
Sandcastle building had made us hungry, so we bought chips from a nearby mobile shop, and smothered them in tomato sauce and mustard. This didn' t go unnoticed by the birds, and we soon had an avian audience waiting for any scraps we might drop. Some of these birds were similar to blackbirds, but walked with a Monty Python-style silly walks gait. The chips were good, and compensated somewhat for the gradual demolition of our sandcastle by the Atlantic Ocean.
My wife and I decided to explore, so we left our two daughters sunbathing. We found an area behind the beach that had showers and toilets (very convenient! ), and fountains. By this time we were hot and thirsty, so we stopped at a small café/bar for a nice cold beer. After a while, we began to feel guilty, so we bought a couple of cold drinks for our daughters, and went back to the beach.
By this time, the tide had encroached on the “roadway”, and I began to be concerned about getting off the beach. I walked to the first exit I could see, but it was closed. I asked at the mobile shop, and was assured that there was an exit further down.
As there were more things we wanted to do (including a visit to the chocolate factory), we packed up our gear and sought the promised exit.
We thoroughly enjoyed our trip to Daytona Beach, and would recommend it for a family day out.
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