How you know Snowbirding has reached its end



 They say that all good things must end, someday.  Our time on the beach is rapidly drawing to its proscribed end.

There are any number of clues that it’s time to go home.  You run out of essentials: toilet paper, fresh squeezed juice, half and half.  You notice that you never used the second item purchased under the Buy One, Get One banner—those will be taken to one of the local food pantries.  The dog has completely shed his winter coat and is now spending the part of his day when he’s not sleeping panting due to temperature increases.  It’s become commonplace to port the chairs down to the beach.

Today I noticed that the bag containing sunscreens has dwindled to the 4 containers pictured above (along with a swim diaper Jackson left behind).  We’ve done a darned good job of keeping ourselves greased up and sunburn free.

If you’re of a certain age, perhaps you noted the tubes of Ban de Soleil on the table.  If so, your sense memory may have drawn up the inimitable scent of Ban de Soleil.  Or the immortal advertising tag line: “Ban de Soleil for the San Tropez tan.”   You can still find this gelee of gelees sporadically at your local drug store, Target and I’m guessing via Amazon.  I’ve been hanging on to these two tubes for quite a while.  Because it has an SPF of 4, it stays in the suntan lotion bag until the very end of any trip and then it makes its mandatory appearance because personally I love the smell.  It pulls me back to college and post college days of baking in the sunshine, thinking that SPF 4 was a vast improvement over the baby oil + iodine skin slatherer we used to use at Foster Avenue Beach in Chicago.

The Ban de Soleil has been pulled from the bag and it indeed smelled luscious.

We’ll be picking up and heading north in a couple days.  The Ban de Soleil goes back into the bag.  I’ll see it again sometime this summer.


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