Wanderings from Susan's Zoo Crew: Hot feet!

After work I decided to go to the South Jetty Beach in Fort Pierce and take some pictures of the beach. So right around 5pm on a nice hot sunny day I get to the parking lot. The little voice in my head says “take your shoes…..the sand will be hot”. Hot? Hah! I’m a native Floridian, I’m *used* to hot. So the little lazy voice overrides that with a complaint of then having to carry the sandals. Keep in mind my tender toes have been stuffed and sweating inside sneakers for 10 hours at this point.

I grab my camera and hop out barefooted……right onto the warm black asphalt parking lot. There must have been someone parked there before me because it wasn’t toooooo bad. Lock the truck and head over to the pavilion that goes to the walk. As I cross the parking lot, I find myself walking on the white lines because they aren’t hot. The orginial little voice repeats “the sand will be hot” but hey I’m stubborn. Get over to the pavilion in one piece and figure the sand can’t be worse than the parking lot! Bravely I step down onto the dune. My first thought was, “this isn’t too bad”.

See, there’s this problem that the nerves in your feet take a few milliseconds to send the signal of “HOT! HOT!” to the brain. My brain told my feet to man up and keep going. Unfortunatly for my feet, my legs listen to my brain and not them. Now I’m about halfway down the sandy walk…and my feet are sending up smoke signals. All of a sudden the HOT HOT signal fully reaches my brain! OW!! Desperate for pain relief, I realize the walk posts are casting a foot sized shadow and plop both feet there for a second. “Now what?” asks the first voice triumphantly.

There’s a point of no return when you are in a situation like this. There I am, standing in a shadow of a piling realizing that it’s about the same distance back to the truck as it is down to the water. As my feet cool down in the shadow, I get brave and decide to just go for it. I mean, I could always run to the ocean right?

So the second stubborn voice reminds me to get a move on before someone sees me trying to balance in the piling shadow. Off we go! Having cooled down for a second, my feet were brave. They waited until we got to the actual beach sand to resume the distress signals. Now here’s another problem-the dune sand was hard and you can walk fast on hard sand. Beach sand is soffffft and you sink in with each step. The faster you try to walk, the further you sink with each step! As the lava temperature sand starts flowing over the tops of my feet I realize I should’ve brought the shoes.

At this point I’ve realized that I’m going to have burned feet. No way out of it. I start analyzing the pain as the ocean seems to retreat further away. Heel? Nope, heel is fine, nice and thick. Sole? Ok, that’s a little hot but no sizzling feelings. Ball? Ball is as thick as heel. Pads of toes? Whimpering and whining. Joints of toes? ON FIRE! I definintely feel some sizzling from there. By now it’s too late, it just hurts and I still go.

Finally I get to the ocean and Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I don’t even care when the first wave runs up my legs and soaks the bottom of my shorts! I stood there for a couple of minutes pondering the fact that I will have to go back the way I came….(sigh). Well, too late now! Once my toes are cooled down to whining stages versus screaming stage I head up the beach for some pictures. As I’m sure you can imagine, I stayed in the water as much as possible.

After about an hour, it was time to finish off the burns and head back. I don’t remember much of the walk back as I was running mentally through every thought I could to distract my feet from their two minute walk on fire! Thankfully that beachs has showers with the foot options so I rinsed off my poached piggies until they went back down to whining stages.

A few hours later at home I dared to finally look……sure enough, two nice big blisters on my second toes were there. The other toes all have let me know they too will have blisters when I wake up tomorrow.

Moral of the story: TAKE YOUR SHOES. SAND IS HOT. :)

I did however get some nice pictures so it was all worth it!