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Outside Magazine's 2003 Family Travel Guide

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Neptune Calling (Cont.)

By Meg Lukens Noonan


	Happy days and the gang (Courtesy, Clearwater CVB)

To have a great beach vacation, you must first, of course, come up with a great destination. While there are nearly as many choices as there are beaches, my family has found that the best spots are the ones that give the illusion of being exotic without requiring major time-zone shifts. We like places that have just enough things to do—but no obvious must-see attractions. We like places where you can venture out at dinnertime with the legitimate hope of discovering some great local dine-in-the-rough seafood shack.

Every April, for example, we flee New Hampshire's mud season by heading for the southwest coast of Florida. We love the low-key islands west of Fort Myers—Captiva, Sanibel, North Captiva, Palm—with their brilliant blue shallows, broad shell-strewn beaches, critter-filled conservation land and waterways, and pastel stilt-house architecture.

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In August we find the same kind of satisfying and easy escape on Nantucket Island, a two-hour ferry trip from the Massachusetts mainland. Even when summer crowds jam the downtown chowder houses and shops, we can still be alone on long stretches of footprint-free sand and on hidden paths that wind through the broom-scented moors. Nantucket has beaches suitable for everyone—from nanny-intensive shallow-harbor crescents like Children's Beach to the big surfer-dude hangouts like Nobadeer on the island's open-ocean south side.

Once you decide where to go, you'll have to determine what kind of accommodations are right for your family. Depending on your budget, your desire for privacy, your need for space, and your hunger for action, that could be anything from a remote cottage in the dunes to a thumping, full-scale resort. We've tried them both—and just about everything in between.

Some of our best finds have been hybrids—places that are part rental, part resort. Florida's North Captiva Island Club Resort, for one, is a very quiet, car-free enclave of rentable beach houses about 15 minutes by water shuttle from Pine Island, which is connected to Fort Myers by a causeway. Renters get golf carts and membership in the "club": two swimming pools, a couple of restaurants, a playground, a spa, a nearby 18-hole golf course, a fleet of beater bikes, and a small marina. South Seas Resort, on Captiva Island, which is nearby and accessible by car, is bigger and slicker but offers the same kind of experience, with villas on the beach and the bay and access to the marina, pools, and restaurants. Kalmar Village, in North Truro, Massachusetts, is a whitewashed cottage colony with a huge pool and shallow beach on Cape Cod Bay that we loved when our kids were really little because there were so many other families there with young children.

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