Larry Hnetka Goes HMmmm

Over at the blog, Mommy Needs A Review, I’m attempting to win an HP Photosmart M447 digital camera by leaving a comment about my “best missed photo memory.”

Here’s the comment I made about my best missed photo memory:

Instead of our usual winter vacation to Mexico or Hawaii, we decided one year to change our tropical tromps and go someplace “cultural.”

We picked London and delayed our holidays until June that year. I arrived feeling quite smug, artsy fartsy and ready to pack in as much theatre, art galleries and cultural stuff as possible. The first four days in London, we tried to ignore how rainy and cold it was.

We passed by a travel agency each of those first four days in London. On the fifth day, we looked at each other, walked into the travel agency and asked “where could we fly that was warm, had beaches and was cheap?”

After a quick search, we left the agency with tickets in hand for a flight the next day for two weeks on the island of Mykonos, Greece.

Even though it was early June, the weather in Mykonos was already like mid-summer back home. There are two popular beaches there: Paradise and Super Paradise. The latter well-known for its cosmopolitan crowd and for completely nude sunbathing.

Here in Vancouver, there is a popular and well-known nude beach called Wreck Beach so being at a nude beach wasn’t a big deal. However, I always liked the look of tan lines (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) and so even though I’d go to Wreck Beach, I always wore my bathing suit.

But there we were at Super Paradise on Mykonos, thousands of miles away from home. Without a thought, the first thing I did when we hit the beach was to strip right down to my birthday suit. The second thing I did was to take off my glasses (I am totally blind without them) and waded into that crystal blue water.

All of a sudden, this guy came running down to where I was now about chest high in the water (I’m a dog paddler not a breast stroker that is for sure). He was yelling something at me in Greek and waving his arms wildly.

Then I heard someone with a British accent yell, “asshole, he’s telling you to get out of the water.” With all this commotion, I knew everyone on the beach was looking at me. And now I had to walk out of the water totally naked with all these eyes directed right at me.

Previous Next Close

Jellyfish sometimes close beaches when they swarm or bloom in massive numbers.

The Greek fellow pointed at the sign posted on the beach but of course I hadn’t seen it. The beach was closed to swimming because there was a huge swarm or bloom of jellyfish.

Remarkably, I did not get one sting even though I was quite far out in the water. Later when I put on my glasses and went to the edge of the water and saw the undulating mass of jellyfish, I really felt like an idiot.

A photo of me in the ocean up to my chin in a bloom of jellyfish is my best missed photo memory — especially the naked me part of the memory!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 1:32:43 AM and is filed under JOURNAL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.