The wind is blowing and rain has moved in but that hasn’t stopped us from hitting the beach for our morning walk. With luck the waves would have kicked up a great collection of shells to pick through and take home for our collection. We slipped on our beach shoes and through sweatshirts over our t-shirt and shorts and off we went.
There was light rain that the wind was driving into us and every so often the wind would pick up sand and pelt our exposed skin. The beach was empty and no one needed to ask the two fools on the beach if they were tourists, it was written all over us. The sea had flattened out and pounded the beach that had been pushed back into place after the past 2 years of storms. Walking was easier than it had been the day before on the new flat surface. I walked along the edge of the surf searching for shells in the remnants of sea foam.
Mother Nature seemed to be sending a message out to all of those people that cared to notice, she hadn’t sent back shells, just human debris of bottle caps, plastic toy parts and cigarette butts. Seeing as shell hunting wasn’t occupying my time my mind drifted to the relatives who had started moving to Florida in the late 1800’s. I wondered if they ever searched the beach for shells or what had even brought them to the area in the first place.
When we returned to the condo I did a search on the web for bathing suit history. Some of the information wasn’t new to me, the fact that they wore clothing that basically covered every inch of skin and then got in the water. What I didn’t realize was they had bath houses that were drug into the ocean by horses and the women would “swim” in front of them. This is a great site for information on Victorian swim wear. For information on swim wear from 1920 and up, this site proved to be interesting too.