Bee Travel
Heat, humidity and happiness at the beach
CHRISTINE HICKS- USTA
We all have dreams. I'm not alone in dreaming of a life by the water, a cozy seaside place to call my own. I envision myself ensconced in a place away from work and the humdrum of everyday life. I envision this life waiting somewhere for me.

Truth is, of course, it isn't. Life doesn't stop for the savoring. You have to enjoy the ride, and find and savor those fragments of time that serve the dream.

You can buy the experience for at least a little while. A seaside rental on the Atlantic is among my most memorable vacations - a week spent at Nags Head, N.C., with family. We rented an overly enormous five-bedroom unit to house four, plus the vagrant friends who popped in during that week in July. The unit we occupied near the beach came with membership in a waterside club where weekly barbecues, cocktail parties and a pool were the draw.

The freedom of having your own place is, well, freeing. For my sister and me, it was a chance - together - to plan meals for ourselves every day. Some might find that a perverse attraction. Except we love to cook, so it was a vacation-worthy challenge to produce nightly feasts. Our piéce de résistance, creatively speaking, was to use up every smidge of food we'd brought or bought and leave with nothing except dirty laundry and wonderful memories.

Seaside vacations are about the beach, but that's not all. Inevitably, on account of rain or a particularly nasty sunburn, you seek other activities to fill your day. This includes, in the case of Nags Head, an evening of theater to see "The Lost Colony," an outdoor drama based on the first English settlement in America and the still-mysterious fate of its colonists.

I must confess, I am not a theater buff. It's not that I don't enjoy the theater; it's that I just generally am too lazy or perhaps cheap to go. But this was vacation, and this was a "must see" from all we'd read.

It was midsummer; it was quite warm. In fact, it had been so hot, we dressed in loosely fitting T-shirt dresses, hopeful they would hang loosely and welcome air circulation.

There was no circulation to welcome on that sultry summer night. The mosquitoes loved us. In all honesty, the heat and humidity were such a distraction that I recall little of the play - except its interminable length, so eager were we to go home to our air-conditioned rental home and wonderfully chilly shower.

So it often is with dreams. They maintain an impossible patina in our imagination, one that can't possibly withstand the rigors of real life. Nonetheless, I welcome and entertain these dreams, for they never fail to entice me to try something else ... and that's reason enough for me to travel anywhere.

(Christine Hicks-Usta has enjoyed more than 30 years of globe-trotting as a member of the travel industry. Direct questions to her at Bee Group Newspapers, P.O. Box 150, Buffalo, N.Y. 14231-0150.)