They say the days blend together but each is distinct.

Check-in times are generally at 2:00, so more than half the Saturday is gone by the time you emerge stiff and sweaty from your car, and anyway there’s work to be done—rentals to check into, groceries to buy—so you’re lucky if you get in a late-afternoon dip in the ocean and a walk on the boardwalk at night. But Sunday you take it all in. You go to the beach in the morning and afternoon, and, though half the ocean has gone up your nose, you stay past 5:00, past the lifeguards, until the sun, once blasting the top of your head, begins to lose its power; then it's dinner and Funland and the parade of people walking and preening along the boardwalk, and you've done so much this day that the next day, Monday, you step back and rest a bit. It is your vacation after all. It is only Monday after all. Even when you get back into it on Tuesday, you think, “Really? It's still only Tuesday?” It feels like you have all the time in the world. But Wednesday disappears, poof, and suddenly it’s Thursday and you know you're on the downside of things, and Friday, oh man, Friday you rush around and do all the things you should have done earlier but never got to, while Saturday morning is filled with melancholy. One last video game. One last walk on the boardwalk. One last look at the ocean. Bye.

I’ve been to many beaches since I was last at Rehoboth Beach, Del.—in Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Florida, Oregon and Washington—but Rehoboth, the beach I grew up with, the beach I went back to for the first time in 25 years last month, is still the one by which all the others are measured.

I expected it to be dirtier but it’s surprisingly clean. I expected it to be more crowded, and it must be—it swells on summer weekends from about 1,500 locals to include 100,000 tourists—but because the boardwalk has been extended further south, past Funland, it doesn’t feel more crowded. I expected the waves to feel puny, the water warm, the jellyfish rampant, but the waves were great, the water bracing, no jellyfish were sighted.

Planes still flew advertisements along the beach. One lone swimmer, in swim cap, still invariably plowed the waters 30 feet from shore. The Dolles sign still dominates the center of the boardwalk.

That doesn’t mean things haven’t changed.

Tomorrow: What's changed.

All previous entries