The Nude Life

A question we had to consider before deciding to live full-time in a nudist resort, and one that keeps many others from joining us in this wonderful way of life, is this: “What do you do when non-nudists want to visit?”

For us, it’s quite simple: we doubt very much that anyone who is not one of our nudist friends will ever care to visit us here. We have no close relatives that are likely to visit; all of them except one know that we live in a nudist resort and are fine with our decision. All of them were unlikely to visit us no matter where we lived, as they did not visit us during the many years when we lived in Texas in the textile world.

None of our non-nudist friends from our old home in Texas are likely to want to visit, but if they do, they are welcome to, and at that time we will tell them that we’d be glad to have them visit us and that we live in a nudist community. If they do decide to visit, we’ll dress for their visit while inside our house, but insist that if they want to use the common areas of the resort, the pools or restaurants or bars, that they observe our custom and requirement to be nude in those areas. If that presents a problem for them, we’ll be happy to go visit them at their hotel or resort and observe their custom of wearing bathing costumes and textiles while we are their guests.

We took the decision when we moved here that we were not going to make choices and arrange our lives so as to suit other people’s wishes or desires. Living the nude life is what we want to do, and so we are doing it. We aren’t going to spend the rest of our lives, which we expect to be happy and many, living in the textile world just to suit the social mores of the textile world.

For other folks who love the nude life, but for whom a full-time residence inside a nudist resort is not possible for whatever reason, many of them wind up with a “dual life” — a home or RV here inside the resort, and another home, townhouse or apartment in the area where they can have the kids / grandkids / non-nudist friends visit, etc. We are not burdened with such complications as we have no children and so of course no grandchildren, either.

And then there is the workaday world of doing business and dealing with the textile world, when servicepeople and vendors must visit to clean the carpets, fix the cable TV, service the HVAC, etc. Those can be broken into two categories: regular service providers who visit the resort regularly for many clients; and those who don’t.

In the case of delivery people like UPS, USPS, FedEx and others, they are in the resort every day and are used to servicing a route inside a nudist resort. No one bothers to dress when those folks are around, and the delivery drivers pay no mind and have no issues performing their duties in our community. In fact, I would guess that they enjoy the portion of their day spent inside our garden-like retreat, and enjoy seeing so many happy, friendly people for at least a few hours a day.

For folks who come into our home to perform their work, like the cable installer or the pest control man, they come by appointment as they would for any client, and so we are dressed during the time we expect them. Today, for example, the cable TV technician will be here to replace a defective DVR for us, and so we are dressed during his expected arrival window. We must also call ahead to the front gate of the resort to clear them into the resort so that they are admitted.

And as for one final question that has come up a few times: all of the staff who work here at the resort are fully dressed while on duty, with one exception. During weekend afternoons, there is a cocktail waitress serving the main pool area, and she is nude but for a standard waitress half-apron where she keeps her supply of napkins, pens, order slips and so on. All of the other staff is clothed while on duty; many of them also live here or are members, and so it’s not at all unusual to see them working their shift clothed during one part of the day, and then see them nude relaxing with the rest of us in the pool, bar or elsewhere on the property when they are off-duty.

Does any of this make sense? Seem right or wrong? Discuss it in The Nude Life Forum!

By way of introduction, and to answer a question posed on our forum and in e-mails by several readers, this post will explain how we went from being complete non-nudists in 1994 to living the nude life full-time in a nudist resort in 2008…and how it changed our lives.

To begin, I should explain that as a boy growing up in the Chicago suburbs and attending public high school, nude P.E. swimming classes were the norm for all public high schools in the state. For reasons of sanitation and convenience, the boys swam nude during the swimming weeks of each year’s Physical Education classes, so as not to have the rust, smell and dank of soggy bathing costumes sitting in shared lockers all day every day. It was perfectly normal, no one got uptight about it, and as amazing as it may seem in today’s overly prudish American society, it was both the most sensible and the most natural approach in getting 250+ teenage boys to swim every day for weeks on end during the long Midwestern winters when outdoor P.E. activities were impossible.

So by the time I was an adult, skinnydipping was something I had experienced for a long time and which was accepted as normal and natural in society, and which of course everyone found to be very comfortable.

Years later, when we bought a house in Dallas with a large backyard that faced the West with no neighbors anywhere around to invade our privacy, I had in mind plans for a swimming pool and privacy fence to help cool us off during the long, hot Texas summers. I certainly didn’t want to mow and tend the large backyard every weekend for the rest of my life, so a swimming pool sounded like the thing to get.

We put the pool in in the summer of 1994, and on the very day it was first filling up with water and the fence was in place, I took advantage of the opportunity to strip down and splash into the still-filling deep end of the pool, luxuriating in the blazing sun and the cooling waters nude for the first time. My wife arrived home shortly thereafter, and she squealed with delight and surprise when she saw me skinnydipping in our new pool while it was still being filled.

I confessed to her my high school experience and told her that I didn’t see the need for wearing any bathing costumes while we enjoyed our new pool. She smiled and laughed, and said that was fine with her if I wanted to do it, but she would be keeping her swimming uniform on, thank you.

Well, it wasn’t too many more 100-degree days before she saw the folly of that statement, when I was spending many happy afternoons and evenings during the midst of July and August heat floating and relaxing in the pool wearing just my hat and a big smile, while she struggled with the confines of a one-piece swimming suit and the soggy, chilly, clammy feeling it provided in and out of the pool.

Soon enough, she joined me in relaxing and enjoying the pool and the warm sun without the bother of textiles, and we realized that we were taking a new step in our lives. Clothes were something we needed to wear most of the time, but there were times when clothes were not only unnecessary, but also just plain silly — such as when we were alone in the peace and quiet of our backyard Eden beneath the blue Texas sky and brilliant sun.

Later the same year, we took a cruise in the Caribbean that included a port of call in St. Martin. We signed up for the “Beach Tour” shore excursion, which featured a visit to the world-famous Orient Beach and the large and beautiful nude beach at its southern half. Shortly after being dropped off the bus at Kon Tiki beach bar and grill by the tour guide, I made my way down the beach to Club Orient, doffed my shorts, and plunked down in the silky sand to soak up my first nude beach day. My wife joined me within a short while, and after about an hour of her seeing how wonderful the surroundings were, how happy and carefree the people around us were, and how magnificent the sea, breeze and sun made us feel, she shed her shorts, swimsuit and top as well.

We wound up overstaying our visit to Orient Bay that day, so reluctant to leave that we missed the tour bus departure and had to grab a cab at Pedro’s to get back to the ship. But before we left, I grabbed a brochure from Club Orient’s front office, and we immediately made plans to return.

Sure enough, we were back at Club Orient less than two months later for a week’s stay–our first nude vacation, and the first time that we realized that we had become nudists. That week was glorious in every way, and we kept regretting not trying all of this much sooner in our lives, since we knew we had found something very special.

Upon our return home, a chance encounter resulted in our being invited to try out the local nudist travel club in our area, and we attended our first nudist party in February of 1995. We loved it, loved meeting so many great people, and loved the fun of just relaxing and having fun free of the restrictions and strata that clothes and society seems to brand people with.

Long story short, being in the nudist club in Texas changed our lives. We became very active in the club, and met many hundreds of really nice folks we never would have met any other way. We enjoyed the nudist parties that were held year-round, and we hosted more than our share of our own parties during the summer as well as during the cooler months. Our private backyard, with its sunny Western exposure and swimming pool and hot tub, made our house a favorite party stop on the annual calendar for our club, and we enjoyed hosting many, many great nude pool parties over the past decade-and-a-half.

Fast-forward to 2006 and our realization that we would be able to retire in another year or two, three at the most. Where to live? The more we thought about it, the more we realized that nudists and the nudist life is something that had become very, very important to us, and we wanted that to be the focus of the second half of our lives. With no children or close relatives to placate with our choices, we were free to decide how to arrange our affairs in retirement without regard to offending them or their sensibilities (just a select few of them know we are nudists). Indeed, we made a concious decision that we would not arrange our affairs to suit the wishes of other people, but that we would do and live the way we wanted to, since it is our life and not theirs we are going to be living. And in fact, all of our best friends are nudists!

Having toured most of the larger nudist resorts in the US over the preceeding 14 years, we kept returning to Florida for its climate and low cost of living. That led us to our new home at Cypress Cove, which is pretty easily the most beautiful, well-run and most established large nudist resort in America.

So it wasn’t any great stretch for us over the past year to put the wheels in motion that have led us to where we are now: living full-time in a lush, tropical garden paradise, serene and filled with beauty and populated by the exact kind of people we have found to be so wonderful in our nudist experiences to date. Happy, easy-going, cheerful, unpretentious, welcoming people who accept you as a friend upon your first meeting and who quickly become close friends and with whom you wind up sharing a great many wonderful times.

So, in a very small nutshell, is how two otherwise “normal,” middle-class, educated, thoughtful and otherwise very conservative people go from the textile world to the nude life 24/7 in less than 15 years. It has been a fantastic experience for us.

Discovering nudism and the great people that it attracts has easily been the best thing to happen to us. Now as we open this new chapter of our lives, I hope this blog will help us tell our story and let others who might come after us know what we have found and what they can look forward to, if they will only give it a try.

Hello, again! And please excuse the two-week absence. We have been away on the road, wanting to blog but too busy due to life’s unexpected and expected interruptions, but all that is finished now and we can look forward to turning some attention back to this blog.

Many folks have written in response to this post that asked, “Now that we’re here, living full-time in a beautiful nudist resort, what do we write about?” Thanks to their suggestions, many topics have been recommended for future disucssion on this blog and indeed will be written about in the coming days and weeks.

Questions about our neighborhood, our neighbors, our community, the resort and much more have all come in, and although the answers to most of them are quite mundane, they deserve an answer and will be given one in the posts to come.

Meanwhile, we are preparing for our housewarming party in the middle of September, where we will get a chance to formally welcome our new neighbors to our new home, get to know them a little better, and break the ice with the few who we haven’t already made connections with. The party will be clothing optional, of course, and I hope to have our hot tub in operation well before the time of the party so folks can soak and bubble during their visit if they like.

And now for the first part of “What It’s Like” — having to do with service people who visit our community for their deliveries, service calls and so on.

All the usual service people you’d expect to see in any neighborhood visit our resort routinely, from the UPS and FedEx drivers, to the USPS letter carrier, to the water / gas / electric / cable / pest / carpet cleaning / plumber people. They know they are servicing a nudist resort — or if they don’t, they should, since our resort has been here for more than 45 years and is well-known in the city and the region.

For the routine delivery people, no one seems to bother on either side of the transaction when deliveries are made. I have greeted our UPS and FedEx driver nude on every occaision they have had to make a stop at our house, and they are completely accustomed to our custom and are just as friendly and professional as if you’d see them anywhere else.

For the other service people, we have dressed for our appointments with the pest and carpet cleaning people, since their arrival time was known in advance and they were going to be in the house for some time performing their work. I suppose other residents here do not bother with textiles for such visits, and I don’t think it is a problem for the service people either way — after all, we are all adults and they have certainly seen naked people before, at least a few times!

And for the service people who deliver and service the resort itself (beer trucks, food deliveries, pool service, electricians, and so on), they work and go about their business in a completely normal way, even with naked folks all around them in the common areas of the resort, on the streets and in the food and beverage outlets. No one makes a fuss, and everything is taken care of.

So at least as far as this question is concerned, it’s no big deal — and that is in fact what we have seen regarding all aspects of our life here in this nudist paradise so far. Nudity is expected, encouraged and completely the norm in all areas and at all times everywhere throughout our community, so no fuss is made about it and no one is offended, distressed or put off by it.

If only that were the case in the rest of society…

Somehow, three-and-a-half full weeks have elapsed since the day we arrived at our new home after making the drive from Texas, to take up residence full-time at America’s most beautiful nudist resort. What an amazing time it has been!

The day we arrived, we made it just in time to head to the pool to cool off, relax and enjoy a few adult beverages at Happy Hour. We spent most of the time during those hourse just smiling at each other, relieved and excited by the realization that we had finally made it, and were now really and truly at our new home, where we can be nude as much as we like all day every day everywhere throughout this beautiful development.

Then we had a scant two days to decompress and start preparing for becoming full-time Florida residents, with all the required administrative overhead that involved. By the time Friday night rolled around, we noticed that about 2,000 visitors had arrived at the resort ahead of the biggest party weekend of the year here, Parrothead Weekend, a giant Jimmy Buffet-themed party with hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the US coming in for the biggest nude Parrothead party anywhere.

We joined in the fun for Friday night, but then received the call from our mover that he was running four days early and wanted to deliver our 3.25 tons of household belongings to us the next morning, Saturday! We knew it was going to be a hassle having him here during such a busy day at the park, but we also wanted to get the unloading over with, so we told him to come on ahead and we made plans to meet his truck and lead him and his crew into the resort about 10:30 Saturday morning.

I went across the street bright and early Saturday morning to meet the giant Mayflower moving truck and greet our driver who loaded us up in Texas. I told him, “Follow me through the gate, keep the speed to 10 MPH, and by the way, this is a nudist resort, so you might see a few people with no clothes on.” His enthusiastic response to that little announcement was surprising and a bit of a relief.

As we led him and his giant truck down the neighborhood streets, he found himself in the midst of a paradise of serenity as we passed by the lakefront, the front office building, the motel villas, and then into the residential neighborhood of beautiful single-family homes. By the time we were at our place and ready to unload, he eagerly remarked, “Man, this is like paradise back here — I’ve never seen anything like this place!” I concurred with both of his observations.

At my urging and with no small amount of my help, in just a few minutes over two hours we had unloaded our 6,500-lbs. of boxes, furniture and everything else we brought from Texas and we were ready to lead the giant Mayflower truck out of the resort…at exactly the time the big “Parrothead Weekend” parade was headed down the main roads of the resort!

It was quite a sight among the 60-plus decorated golf carts, motorcycles, scooters and bicycles to see a giant Mayflower semi truck and tractor crawling along, with the three crew inside seeing hundreds and hundreds of naked folks in their finest Margaritaville regalia. Women were throwing beads into their open tractor cab windows, tossing Jell-O shots at them, and of course whooping and yelling. And the driver and his two-man crew were smiling and laughing the whole time, sure that they would never see another sight like this in their lives.

In the three weeks since that day, we have managed to unpack every box and stow away / hang / store / arrange everything we moved from Texas. We bought a new BBQ grill and set up our kitchen and dining room, gotten the TV, Internet and other utilities online, and set up our three computers and the wireless network in the house, along with the cable box and stereo…so all the modern conveniences are up and running.

Plus, we’ve gotten into the wonderful resort-style living routine that we have looked forward to: activities nearly every night of the week, nice afternoons by the pool when we’re able to dodge the almost daily afternoon thunderstorms, and the luxury of not needing to be dressed for days at a time as we go about our routine.

It’s hard to imagine that after only three weeks, we’re both really getting used to being nude all day as the norm, but that seems to be the case. The morning routine is much simpler and quicker: arise, shower / shave / shampoo, then towel off, comb the hair, swipe on some underarm deodorant, then set off for the driveway where our daily copy of the Orlando Sentinel awaits.

Breakfast, coffee and the rest of the day commences from there, without the need or a thought to getting dressed or what to wear, when, unless we need to run an errand or visit the grocery store. Simple, blissful, comfortable, delicious nudity day and night. It doesn’t take any time at all to see why everyone here loves this place and this way of life so much.

Beyond all that, there’s not a whole lot to write about! We go about our day as usual, doing all the things anyone would do living in a small residential community: ride our bike down to get the mail every afternoon; go out to dinner; have a beer at the pool during our afternoon of sun and relaxation; chores around the house; yard work; etc., etc. Not terribly remarkable. Maybea visit from Fay will make life even more interesting here in the next few days!

So, the question is, what’s next to write about? I ask my readers to suggest topics they’d like to see mentioned in upcoming posts. Send your ideas to editor@thenudelife.com and we’ll see where it takes us!

If all goes to plan, we will arrive at our new home in Florida a week from today, and then take up The Nude Life full-time at long, long last. Between then and now, we have an increasingly daunting list of tasks to complete, not the least of which is closing on the sale of our house here in Texas and then driving with our cat some 1,100 miles to Central Florida in our sub-compact economy car.

It has been a three-month-long effort to scale down our belongings and ties to the home we have lived in for 18 years in North Texas. About three-quarters of everything we owned in the way of furniture, clothes, books, appliances and other detritus has been given away to friends and charities. When the moving truck shows up on Monday morning to cart away the balance of our material possessions, it will amount to what is typical for a two-bedroom apartment and not the 3,800-sq.-ft. single-family home it was when this process began.

To say we are excited about the big move finally happening would be an understatement, but there is also a fair amount of dread in the mix, as we have a hellacious amount of “stuff” to do in the next seven days before we can finally shed our clothes, open our first cold beer at our new home, and head down to the pool for an afternoon’s relaxation in the nude for the first time as residents of our new community.

With all that happening over the next seven days, don’t expect any blog posts until we have arrived in Florida and the cable guy arrives to hook up our TV and Internet at the house and we’re back online for good from our new home. Wish us luck if you have a mind to, and we’ll be back in touch from Central Florida by this time next week!