The day before we left California, Kamran finally took me to The Beach. He’d been consulting his friends all week long about which of their favorite beaches he should take me to, and I was under the impression that these beaches were each something we’d need to drive to.
Like in Ohio, where you have one beach to choose from. Or NYC, where you have a handful of beaches but only one you’d actually touch with your bare skin.
But it turns out that when you talk about Laguna Beach, you’re talking about the Main Beach and these smaller beaches separated from it by cliffs. CLIFFS!! I thought the Hamptons and its beaches that stretch for miles were pretty, but cliffs are way more beautiful and make for way more interesting waves.
Of course I didn’t take that into account when choosing a bathing suit, which I haven’t owned for approximately 10 years now. I bought a tankini with a halter on top and these ridiculously tiny bottoms with strings on the sides so you can make them even shorter. Taking a note from my friend California-turned-Chicago friend Beth, I decided to wear opaque black underwear as bottoms to hide some of my trunk-junk, only I went ahead and put the regular swimsuit bottoms on over the underwear.
Don’t ask what made me think that had any chance of being successful.
The waves break unnaturally close to the shore at Crescent Beach, so I wasn’t even in up to my waist when a wave grabbed me, tossed me, and dragged me ten feet back. It was totally fun–if totally scary–and I was about to dive back in for more when I realized that both of my bottoms were around my knees, the bottom of my top was up to my neck, and what was supposed to be covering my boobies was not.
This happened over and over again for the next two hours as Kamran politely reminded me that small children in body-covering wetsuits were hovering around us on surfboards. I couldn’t help it, though, and I didn’t really want to. The water was way too cold for it being August, so the water was practically ours, and it was so much clearer than East coast water is. The waves were huger than any I’d ever seen, and Kamran taught me to dive underneath the crests to avoid, you know, dying. I found it much more fun to turn my back to them and flail my legs as they overtook me, which sometimes resulted in me riding them but more often resulted in me washing up on shore like some sort of unclothed whale.
Not that whales wear clothes. So some kind of regular whale, I guess.
And then we walked around for hours, buying one of everything at The Candy Barron, drinking horchata at the wonderful La Sirena Grill, and generally reliving all of Kamran’s high school and college memories.
I was so amazed at how Laguna Beach is really indie and artsy and exactly opposite of how all of those reality TV shows portray it. When we pulled up to the beach, parking was nonexistent, but we happened to come across a guy who was cleaning off his surfboard by his car. I called out, “You don’t happen to be on your way out, do you?”, and he said, “Yeah, but I’ll be about five minutes.” I said, “We’re happy to wait!” and we sat back patiently with some Beach Boys. But we looked up a second later, and he had pulled his car forward in front of someone’s driveway so we could have his spot right away. Swoon.
More to swoon over:
The day started off cloudy,
and I thought it was going to rain,
but apparently this happens every morning
and burns off by afternoon,
revealing the bluest sky
and the brightest-but-not-hottest sun.
And here’s Kamran in a phonebooth for no good reason.
