Some people wait for months to take winter vacations where they can fly down mountains on a pair of skis.

Others love getaways where they’re hiking over mountains and through meadows. Still others love window shopping excursions where they wander in and out of expensive boutiques.

For me, the best vacation is spent on the beach under an umbrella with a good book, listening to the waves crash on the shore, tension and stress melting away.

My favorite beach is in Gulf Shores, Ala. Our family’s been going to the same condo and the same spot on the beach for over 25 years.

We started going to Gulf Shores when we lived in Louisiana and our boys were toddlers. We kept going because of the family-friendly attitude there.

For our first few years, Gulf Shores stayed a quiet retreat with inexpensive restaurants and a nearby outlet mall for families on a budget. In the last decade, however, Gulf Shores’ popularity has exploded.

The county added a huge outlet mall, manicured golf courses and an endless sea of non-descript chain restaurants. They were looking for those big-city bucks the Florida destinations were raking in, so they jumped on the commercial bandwagon.

As a result, Gulf Shores changed from a laid-back hideaway into a elbow-to-elbow city of high-rise, expensive condominiums. The growth also brought crowded roadways, expensive souvenir shops and wall-to-wall tourists in stores and restaurants.  

Every year, I whine about the traffic jams and cheap keepsakes and say we’ll find another place to vacation. Maybe this is the year we’ll go to the mountains, I’ll tell my husband, or better yet find a nice place in the Hill Country.

My son kept telling me about Surfside and how much he thought I’d like it.  I’d heard the Texas beaches were crowded and the water dirty. He kept telling me I was wrong, but I was secretly holding on to what I knew was familiar. Change is difficult, especially a change that requires one to give up such a beautiful place.

But one recent Sunday afternoon, he invited me to come to Surfside with his family. I decided to see what a Texas beach was all about, and I packed the car with my umbrella and chair and headed south.

At first, I wasn’t too excited. The hour-long drive took me past fields of smoking refineries and rusted oil tanks. When I pulled up to the beach access, though, I was pleasantly surprised. The sand wasn’t quite as white as the sand in Alabama, but it was clean.

The water wasn’t that deep emerald green, but the same earthy smell of salt-water oceans was in the air. The beach wasn’t too crowded, and the sounds of laughter and giggles from children down the beach could be heard faintly.

It’s difficult to change a 25-year tradition, but I realized it was foolish to keep driving all those miles to a beach when Surfside was close to home.

With some reluctance and a few tears in my eyes, I signed the papers to sell our time share. It was time to turn to what’s close to home.

That’s not only the beach in Surfside, but my family. As majestic as the waves are when they crash on those sugar-white beaches in Alabama, nothing’s better than watching my grandchildren laughing and jumping in the waves on a beach here in Texas.

So now I keep my beach chair and umbrella handy because I never know when I’ll need to recharge my batteries. That surf, sand and sun therapy session is just down the road.  

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.