Sun, Sand, and a Margarita

One of the many times my wife Alice was in the hospital, she wistfully said, “When I get out of here, I want us to go on vacation someplace… I’m looking for sun, sand, and a margarita.”

And so after she got out and had recovered quite a bit, off we went to Duluth, Minnesota.

The “sun” part was easy. Enough of that between rainstorms that I got a bit pink since I refused sunscreen.

“Margarita?” We were just across the street from a Tex-Mex restaurant, so that was easily accomplished also, albeit with a mad dash on foot back to our hotel on the way back due to a pelting thunderstorm.

But “sand?” None of that. The water’s edge of Lake Superior was all boulders and jagged rock—no sand to be seen in the area, although the view was certainly pretty.

But wait! We’d bought a bike lock for her wheelchair in case we needed to leave it someplace, and the random pre-determined combination happened to be… SAND.

Good enough!

I was mistaken. Years later we discovered there was a small sandy beach close to the Duluth harbor entrance. We scattered her ashes there, just offshore.