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.

It’s been over two weeks since the last post here on The Nude Life. Readers are left to wonder if we have run out of things to write about.

Well, with the colder weather here in the North Texas region, things have slowed down a bit for us full-time nudists. We still spend most of every day and of course all of each night nude, but regrettably it is all done indoors because of the cooler weather. There hasn’t been any lack of nudist activities, though.

We have enjoyed several days of nude relaxation with nudist friends, at indoor nudist parties and at a Thanksgiving dinner with some good nudist friends who welcomed us over for the day and a nice traditional dinner. Clothing was optional at the Thanksgiving dinner, and everyone was perfectly comfortable regardless of what they chose to wear or not wear. The two nudist parties we’ve enjoyed since the last posting were likewise very enjoyable, and it is a great pleasure to be able to “unwrap” and unwind with good friends, free of clothing for a few hours despite the cold weather.

Also in the interim, we managed to sign up for a trip of a lifetime: the 15-day nude cruise to Hawaii and back slated for 2010. Bare Necessities is chartering a magnificent mega-cruiseliner for the idyllic tour of the Hawaiian islands for some 2,000 lucky nude cruisers. We’ll be among them, in some 840 more days, along with at least a handful of our nudist friends from here in North Texas who have already also signed up.

We’re looking ahead a week now to the big annual Holiday Party held by our home nudist club, which is always a lot of fun and is always well-attended. The following week provides two more dates for nude parties, including a nude Christmas get-together on December 25 and a very much anticipated “Nude Year’s Eve” party planned for December 31. It will be the 14th year in a row we have spent the New Year’s night nude, either with our nudist friends from home, or aboard a nude cruise ship as we did for the Millennium in 1999-2000.

What are your nude plans for the holidays? Are you staying home, visiting a local resort, or heading out to a resort or other nudist destination for some nudist relaxation during the holidays? Discuss your plans, or get tips and advice from other nudists from all around the world in The Nude Life Forums!

We have re-published our series of blog postings from the nude cruise aboard the M/S Holland America Maasdam which we wrote during the cruise in February of this year. The complete series of posts from each day of the 10-day cruise is online in the Nude Cruises section of The Nude Life Forum.

If you haven’t seen those postings before when we wrote them back in February while on the cruise, you can read them all here, in one place, with a few links sprinkled in for reference to some of the items mentioned.

We hope you enjoy reading the posts as much as we did writing them. And as always, we invite your comments, feedback and questions — either here in the comments section of the blog, or in the Forum itself.

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!