The Nude Life

Lo and behold the front page of The New York Times Web site today, where a 2-page color cover story in the Sunday Travel section highlighted the growing industry of nude travel and nude resorts.

The cover shot is of the main pool at Hidden Beach Resort and some guests playing nude water volleyball, one of the prime mid-afternoon activities at that lovely resort and one which I have enjoyed for many delightful hours. The accompanying photo gallery of shots from other resorts including the beautiful new Mira Vista Resort and Spa outside Tucson in Arizona are quite revealing, especially for a mainstream family newspaper.

Overall, a good article, ignoring the common mistake of labeling naturists as “naturalists” and the reference to Sea Mountain Inn as a legitimate nudist resort (it is not). This kind of ‘exposure’ can’t do anything but help bring the idea of taking a ‘nakation‘ to the minds of the several million Sunday Times readers this weekend — just ahead of a long, warm summer in the US. Millions more Web site readers will also be let in on the little secret we nudists have enjoyed for many years: once you take a nude vacation, no other kind of vacation measures up.

Big thanks to AANR for working with the Times reporters on this story for many months.

In the 34+ years since I last strapped on a pair of roller skates, a few things have changed. Back in my high school days, when I was on the varsity swimming team, I was a 6-foot, 4-inch mass of sinewy muscle, proably about 4% body fat, and able to bury my fellow high school football player jock friends in endurance, upper-body and leg strength, and pretty much everything else. My friends and I roller skated almost every weekend at some of the many huge new roller rinks that sprouted up around the Chicago area in the early 1970’s, and of course, I was still more than two decades away from discovering nudism.

Today, I’m sorry to report that although I am still 6′ 4″, I am a typical doughy middle-aged white guy, whose chiseled musculature from high school is now just a memory on an atrophied, fleshy bodkin. But, that didn’t keep me and 25 other nudist friends from our first-ever nude roller skating party last night.

We had a blast. Most of us had, like me, not strapped on a pair of skates in at least a couple of decades. And amazingly, none of us made fools of ourselves (other than the very act of skating around in circles for two hours without a stitch of clothing on), and there were very, very few spills and no broken bones, split skulls, or compound fractures.

The rink owner was gracious and accommodating, too. He said it was the first time he’d ever hosted a nudist group in the 30 years he’s owned his rink. His DJ, however, said with a wink that, “unofficially,” there had been a nude skating party there in the past — and it seemed as though he had a set of keys to the place.

Everyone enjoyed the evening, and we are planning to make the nude skating night an annual event for the club. We also snapped some group photos, which we will submit to AANR for publication in The Bulletin in an upcoming issue.

This isn’t our first big rodeo.

Before deciding to start our own blog, we had some fairly good results acting as an “unpaid reporter” for another nudist blog earlier this year, when we filed a series of reports from the 10-day nude cruise on the Holland America Maasdam. Those reports are ours, along with all the photos filed with them, and the series of posts got a lot of visibility on the nudist Internet at the time — in fact, Bare Necessities still has a link to those posts on their main Web page.

After seeing the kind of readership those postings got on someone else’s blog, it got us to thinking about the apparent vacuum in blogs written by and about real nudists, doing the kinds of things real nudists do. That led to finally deciding to start up this blog, since we think we have plenty of nudist experiences to share, and lots more to come in the future.

Indeed, we plan to spend the better part of the rest of our lives nude, living at a nudist resort when we retire next year and traveling part of the year to visit nudist resorts around the country, attend the AANR conventions, and so on. In effect, the rest of our lives will be spent as nude as we can, in as many places as we can, and doing as many new things as we can within the nudist lifestyle.

Besides, we like to write, and we like to spread the fun and relaxation of social nudism to as many nice folks as we can. Maybe this little blog, just one among many millions, can help with that — and let us share our love of this wonderful lifestyle with friends we haven’t even met yet!