The second thing I love most about the beach is how the kindness of strangers is beyond anything you will ever get the pleasure of experiencing outside the realm of the surf side communities.
When our car hit soft sand, you can drive on the beaches here in Texland, and lodged itself firmly in place and begged for a rope and a 4X4... we hardly had to look far before a helping hand was reached out to us.
A man unhooked his boat from his truck and pulled us out. We were so grateful and sooo remorseful when he lodged himself in the sand after bailing us out. But yet again, another stranger of kindness came about in a jeep with giant nubby all-terrain tires to pull his truck out. After all that, no one wanted anything more than the feel good that came from 'paying it forward'.
Everyone on the beach has at least once got stuck and had to be pulled out by someone and they seemed more than satisfied just to pay it forward. Exception would be the tow trucks that vulture in on a sand stranded car and offers services in the G range ($1000). But they don't see much action due to the folks with a truck and a kind heart.
The kindness did not stop on the beach.
After we got out of the sand, we drove back to the hotel. On the way, the car burst the coolant hose just as we pulled in for gas. At the gas station, several people offered aid and one of the kind strangers drove us to and from to retrieve a new hose from an auto part store 10 miles up the road. I tried to offer him some small thank you but he refused to take it.
He was just glad to help.
Once we had the hose in place, we were back on the road when only a few miles drive beat our car into submission with a broken belt. We pulled over to let the hell hot engine cool down. Again, several people stopped to offer aid.
We declined thinking we could make it even though majority of opinion was against the odds.
A few minutes later we revved up and tried to engine crawl back to the hotel. The gamble did not pay off and we were teetering on burning out the engine. We spotted a diner and began to pull in when, lo and behold, we spotted a mechanics shop on the next corner. Our car made it the last leg of turmoil road and puttered into the shop just as they were about to close.
The mechanic, who just locked up, re-opened his shop, looked at our car and put us at the front of the line of cars, in the a.m., to have it complete before our noon check out time at our hotel and had a friend pick us up from the shop to drive us back to the hotel 15 miles away.
The car was not ready by noon but that is a story for another day.
All in all, I have to say God was looking out for us. And when I say God, I mean the universe and its energy and how, in some weird way, we are all connected.
We look so often to the sky and a heaven for answers and miracles, when we should just be grateful for the simple gesture of an act of kindness from another human being.
The Blonde likes to connect!
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