Beach Vacation Spots
The Best Beaches for a Vacation

Is a beautiful beach your idea of a great vacation spot? Here are a few suggestions for you beach bunnies.

How do you find a perfect beach? The best beaches have soft, fine sand like powdered sugar. They have water that is warm, clear and clean. The ocean water is shallow with gentle currents. The weather is temperate. Natural beauty and scenic vistas are a must. A good beach must be roomy, long enough and wide enough so you can enjoy yourself. A good beach has all the facilities you want in other vacation spots, picnic areas, cleanliness, bathrooms, and free parking. You might also appreciate surroundings that are not commercialized or overbuilt. Lastly, who wants a crowded beach where everybody kicks sand in your face.

How do you find such a vacation spot? A list of the best beaches is published each year by Dr. Beach, a professor at Floriday Intl University named Steven Leatherman. The professor has set himself the enviable task of personally visiting the beaches in the United States. To rank the beaches, he uses a scientific scale with 50 criteria, kind of like the Michelin stars for restaurants.

Drum roll, please! And the 2011 winner is... Siesta Beach in Sarasota, Florida. Siesta Beach is so calm you can measure the waves in inches, not feet.

There's one drawback to the list of best beach vacation spots. Once a beach makes the top of the list, typically 20% more visitors are drawn to it, and it could become crowded. And you may notice that all the beaches on this list have ocean frontage. Maybe inland beaches, like Cedar Point on Lake Erie, or Lake Mead in Nevada, just don't measure up this year.

Moreover, this list is not the be-all and end-all of great beaches. There are other fine beaches worth considering as a vacation spot. Whenever a beach is chosen as the top vacation spot, its name is retired from future rankings. So beaches that won in previous years also offer a great vacation experience.

Here are the beautiful beaches that qualify in 2011 as the best vacation spots in the United States. If you live or vacation near one of these beaches, you can count on a wonderful time.

1. Siesta Beach, Sarasota, Florida on the Siesta Key barrier island
2. San Diego's Coronado Beach
3. Kahanamoku Beach in Waikiki Honolulu, Hawaii;
4. Main Beach, East Hampton, N.Y.
5. Cape Hatteras in North Carolina
6. St. George Island State Park, Florida Panhandle
7. Beachwalker Park, Kiawah Island, S.C.
8. Coast Guard Beach, Cape Cod, Mass.
9. Waimanalo Bay Beach Park, Oahu, Hawaii
10. Cape Florida State Park near Miami

You may ask how the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico affected Gulf beaches. Fortunately, Siesta Beach in Sarasota and other beaches on Florida's west coast remained untouched by crude. Instead, a big rotating current trapped the oil 100 miles offshore and spun it around like a centrifuge until it disappeared. Now oil cannot be found, even on the beaches in the Florida Panhandle.

I hope you have an exciting vacation in New York City.
I wish you a very happy day.

Jeff, Vacation Welcome

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Beach Vacation Spots



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