Anna Maria Island, Florida

Let's all work for 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year to afford ourselves an entire fortnight of leisure and fun in the sun!

Quietly resting in the barrier islands of Gulf Coast Florida sits a small vacation town called Anna Maria Island. Unlike the retiree crowds of nearby Clearwater or the young professional partiers of Tampa, the island is a welcomed refuge after battling the endless stretch of Private Parking Only signs that dominate the notoriously gated communities along the gulf.

January is both an ideal and miserable time to live in your van in Florida. Campsites, RV parks, and any other place to legally park your home are booked months in advance; but it wouldn’t matter to me anyway, given those sites run in the $80-100 per night range. The majority of my time in Florida was spent either parked at my cousin’s house or stealthily on a crowded street — rarely did I ever wake up close enough to the beach to actually see it.

There are very few public lands¹ actually on the beach anywhere in America. Anytime you see a #vanlife video of a couple opening their doors to reveal a beautiful beach sunrise, it’s either staged or an expensive, hard-to-book camping spot. Or, if it is a real, legal, free, beachfront spot, you can guarantee they will never reveal the exact location.

Anna Maria Island made its way onto my radar after a colleague mentioned it in passing as a beloved childhood vacation destination. Without any research or additional information, I made my way to the island.

A long and skinny strip of land, Anna Maria Island is neither flashy nor grim. Along the main road, stretching from the bridge from Bradenton to the tip of the archipelago, you’ll find mostly vacation homes and a few local restaurants, maybe a bar or two. All in all, there’s not much to see here, which is probably what makes it so attractive to the overworked American parent looking for a quiet, “family-friendly” place to drop their kids off while they head to that one bar with their friends that they only get to see once every three years (when the kids’ school schedules all line up).

A society obsessed with productivity, career orientation, and total lack of guiltess leisure must invent a new kind of space to occupy when the workers have exhausted their brains out of use. A space where everything is theirs yet they bear no responsibility for it; a space that you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year to be able to enjoy. It is the coveted Vacation Town, and no one does it better than Florida, baby!

This particular Vacation Town was predominately populated with nice, quiet, white nuclear families, possibly with grandma and grandpa in tow. There were a few young couples enjoying a romantic getaway, but for the most part, my impression was that this was where 40-something parents came with their teen kids who were too young to drink but too old to be entertained by the family’s normal repertoire of kid distractions (the zoo, children’s museums, etc).

Through sheer dumb luck and a little patience, I found a legal spot to park close to the beach, overnight, for free — a coveted find anywhere, let alone in the snow bird capital of the world. I nestled myself on a street that dead ended at the beach inbetween two empty vacation homes, right on the water. They were vacant either due to a gap between families visiting or were simply unsold homes. I had a hard time believing it could be either.

Both houses were bland: the worst sin a beach house can commit. Why bother living on the beach if you’re not going to paint it bright green with orange shutters? And I didn’t hold out hope that the eventual inhabitants of these houses would give them any personality; with that kind of money, you don’t need a personality.

This is a common way to sleep for the night in the van. If there isn’t a sign explictly stating No Overnight Parking or No Car Camping, you’re in the clear. But even technically legal spots can be awkward to stay in long, especially when the spot is prime beach parking for envious umbrella- and cooler-carriers. But I took my chances and parked — the opportunity to hear the ocean waves at night was too seductive to care about nosey tourists taking a double-look when they walked past the opened back doors.

“Hey there, is this your van?” a man in his 60’s asked me, the woman sitting alone in said van.

I nodded and smiled “yes sir, it is. I built it myself.” (Even when no one asks, I tell people that I built the van myself. I crave the look of initial disbelief followed by genuine admiration after I tell someone this fact. It is an intoxicating sequence of events.)

“And you’re parked here to camp?”

This was a tricky question and I almost always lie when someone asks. He’s either just curious about how van life works and is going to ask me a series of similarly boring logistical questions purely because he thinks it’s interesting; or, he’s gathering information to complain to the police about. Granted, in this moment, I know that I am legally allowed to be here, so I am less evasive about the ask: “it wouldn’t be a bad place to camp!”

He smiles and nods “you got that right, what a view!” - the former, as I suspected.

I recognize in moments like these my immense privilege to live a life like this without knowing a certain depth of fear. I am a young white woman in a fancy-looking, clean van. I have enough money in my bank account to gas up and leave immediately to go somewhere else safe. And while I do know the fear of men encroaching on my space, I’ve actually never felt scared or deeply uneasy in the van once. If this man had called the cops, they’d ask me to leave, maybe write me a ticket (that I can pay off), but nothing more.

It’s good to make nice with the locals when you know you’ll be around for more than a night. But this man probably wasn’t a local. I don’t love chatting with tourists in these towns because the gap between us feels far too great. But I always make friends with service industry folks. My people.

One night, I took myself out on a date and found a nice restaurant just up the street from my parking spot. The exterior looked like a converted single-family home made even more perfect by its bright yellow paint and blue door and shutters. They get it.

I sat at a high top in the corner of the bar area and put my phone on do not disturb. I was ready to enjoy a peaceful night when I unwillingly caught the conversation of another group in my dining room:

“This key lime pie is like crack!”

“How do you know what crack tastes like?”

“I’m told it’s just like pie!”

Hahahahahahhha!!

At the bar, a man with salt and pepper hair and an orange Hawaiian shirt slid his hand down his wife’s ass, gave her a rub, and spanked her lightly, signaling a clear “let’s get out of here” mood. They were seated with two other couples, but it was very clear that they were on a different frequency than their friends. The other couples seemed to be there because there was nothing better to do; the first couple was there to reignite some passion and I both judged and found this endevour kind of sweet. The two remaining couples continued to eat and complain about the most recent Super Bowl halftime show from the previous Sunday with the overly eager, standup comedian-type bartender. He made them laugh a lot, despite never telling one funny joke.

“A man walks into a bar. As he sits down, he looks up and notices three pieces of meat hanging from the ceiling. He asks the bartender, “What’s with the meat?” The bartender says, “If you can jump up and slap all three pieces at once, you get free drinks for an hour. If you miss even one, you pay for everyone else’s drinks for the rest of the night. Wanna give it a go?” The man takes another look at the meat and says, “I think I’ll pass. The steaks are too high.””

Uproarious laughter.

What struck me as so odd watching these two couples was that they were not sitting next to their own spouses: they were sitting boy-boy girl-girl. The salt and pepper couple were the only ones seated togeher.

I surmised that the couples met through their kids being friends, perhaps from living in a neighborhood together; I did not think they’d be friends old friends from college - they just didn’t have that level of intimacy there. The meals here would end up costing around $85 per person - including the wine, if you were cheap - and the bill was happily fought over by friends.

I wondered if they always came here as a group or if this was an invitation from one of the couples. I wondered if any of them owned these houses outright or perhaps as a timeshare together. I wondered if their kids were down the beach a bit getting high or if they’d won the right to stay home alone for the weekend yet. I wondered if that first couple even made it back to the house before going at it. I wondered if they were happy.

I wrapped up dinner and checked my bill. Classic mistake: I didn’t ask about the price of the special. It was $42. Before wine. And I got a fancy salad. I tried not to, but I felt guilty for spending that much on a single meal for no occasion. Even if the occasion was me.

The bar had cleared out. I was alone with my “funny” bartender and all of the closers rushing around, completing their end-of-the-night tasks. I offered to leave multiple times, but was assured multiple times that it’s cool to sit and finish my wine at my own pace. Growing up working in my dad’s restaurant, plus the barista job I maintained the entirety of college, I think, gave me a good read on when an offer like that is genuine or not.

As I drank my wine and enjoyed the benefits of being kind² to the crew, I heard a portion of a conversation coming from the kitchen. They were mostly recapping the most annoying tables from the night. One of the hostesses revealed a phone number that a middle-aged customer slipped her while his wife was in the bathroom. One of busboys made a reference to Sisyphus. I assumed the context and hurried my pace.

I went to the bathroom once more before I leaving. By now, the entire restaurant was empty; some of the closers didn’t notice I was still there in the bathroom and they started playing loud music. When I walked out of the bathroom, the waitress froze, cut off the music, and apologized profusely. Given that this was a fairly nice restaurant and her particuar choice of music may have offended their typical clientele, I could tell she was scared I would complain to someone important.

I laughed and told her “I’m still here an hour after y’all closed; if anything, I’m apologizing to you.” She smiled with relief and put the music back on, albeit at a slightly lowered volume.

We chatted a bit more and then stepped outside to smoke a cigerette. She asked me where I was from and I gave her the spiel. Yeah, DC for a decade, now I’m living in this van, it’s crazy, rent just got too high to stay. It’s been fun, it’s been hard, I’m just parked over by the beach, it’s a nice spot. Sometimes it’s lonely, sometimes it doesn’t feel worth it, sometimes I think I’ll never stop moving because I love it so much.

She lamented to me about her new communte from the mainland to the island for work now that rent was too expensive. “Which is crazy,” she said, “because it’s not like anyone actually lives here full-time. These are mostly just empty houses except the few weeks a year that it’s really at capacity. But those people don’t live here, they stay here.”

There was a moment of solidarity built between us, knowing that neither of us belonged here among this constituency. We had been slowly and quietly edged out of our communities to make room for empty buildings. We shared the disappointing reality that we couldn’t afford to be in a place like this as real residents and had to make room for a different type of fake resident: one who could afford to not always be there.

She asked for another cigarette before I walked back and I handed her the pack. “Here, I quit already,” I said.

She replied, “me too,” before accepting the half-empty box of Spirits.

1. https://www.usgs.gov/news/technical-announcement/mapping-public-lands-united-states

2. Basic human decency