Happy Birthday, Megan!

When I previewed the picture I had just taken, I told Megan we would have to retake it.

“Why?” she asked me, obviously not happy to have to pose for yet another of my pictures.

 “Well for starters,” I tried to explain to her, “there’s a naked woman on the beach down there.”

For Megan’s birthday we had decided to go to a beach not far from our campus.  After a short hike on a beautiful path through the woods we came to an opening right at the beach.  We were sure "our" beach had to be very close, since our directions had taken us right to this spot.  Assuming that the picture-ruining woman was simply on the nude part of the beach, we decided we were probably supposed to walk through the nude beach to get to the regular beach.

After some convincing and a few moments to get over the shock of it all, I had Megan courageously lead us through the beach.  As I watched each step she took, careful not to see anything but her feet in front of me, I was hopeful that we would soon reach a spot where I could perhaps look around and enjoy the beach instead of Megan's feet.  When I saw her feet stop moving, I somehow knew that we hadn’t walked far enough to be out of the nude beach.

“We’re trapped.  There’s nothing on the other side of that rock.  We have to stay here,” she told me.

Perfect.  All I'm trying to do is go somewhere with clothed people and now we can't even do that.  Trying not to make the situation more awkward than a nude beach is to begin with, we decided we could just stay there and mind our own business.  After finding two rocks to use as blinders and wedging ourselves far out of view of anything, I realized the nude beach wasn’t so bad.  But I also figured it wouldn't hurt anything to pretend to be asleep the whole time I was there...you know, just in case.

“Do you know what this beach is?” we heard a man ask us, the only clothed people on the beach, about an hour later.

Wanting to seem like we weren’t just some Americans who had somehow stumbled upon a nude beach, Megan simply told him we did.  (I’m not sure what he was expecting us to say at this point.  Oh, this is a nude beach?  I hadn’t noticed that everyone around me wasn’t wearing clothes but now that you mention it... )

“So, umm, your clothes…Why?” he tried to ask us.

Now, I’ve never been asked this question before so I had no good answer as to why I was wearing clothes.  “I don’t know…because that’s what I do every day?  I get up and put on clothes,” was the best I could come up with.  Luckily I was “asleep” and left Megan to answer it.

Megan, understanding that he was actually asking us if we would be partaking in the -uhhh- culture, told him, “Not today,” and laughed as if we were simply not in the mood to be naked in the middle of a beach. 

Right, Megan.  Not today.