The Nude Life

Our local nudist club has themed parties and events throughout the year, with nearly every weekend offering another opportunity for nude relaxation and fun with lots of great nudist friends. During the cooler winter months when necessity forces us indoors for the season, we often schedule themed parties that have a potential for “costume nudity” where we can add to the fun by “dressing up” to fit the theme of the party. Halloween is the obvious example, but we also have themed parties for Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Christmas, and several others, where quite a few folks go out of their way to put on more (or more often, quite a bit less!) of a costume to fit the theme.

As has been mentioned earlier, nobody knows how to dress up more than nudists. But even at our annual Halloween “Un-Costume” party, which features some of the most inventive and hilarious Halloween costumes you can imagine, several attendees decided not to bother with any costume at all, and simply enjoyed the evening nude. Nude is always in fashion and always acceptable at our club’s parties, and dispensing with a costume no matter what the theme of the party is an excellent — and often-employed — option.

It is such a pleasure to not have to worry about not only what to wear, but that you needn’t wear anything at all to be perfectly in style among your fellow nudists. Non-nudists will never know the sublime comfort that comes from simply disrobing and being among friends, nude and unashamed, enjoying life and friendship without the pretension and complications and artificiality that is part of the textile world.

Nude is always an option among nudists. We found the same thing on all of the many great nude cruises we have enjoyed over the years. We’d spend the evenings at sea enjoying the ship, the casino, the shows in the show lounge, the cocktail lounges and dance clubs, in whatever state of dress or undress suited our mood — with hundreds of other nude cruisers alongside us — and no one paying the slightest mind to what, if anything, anyone was wearing. Naturally, nude was always in style aboard the nude cruises, and we along many of our shipmates took full advantage of that luxury by being nude as much as possible during the cruise.

This weekend offers another themed party in our club, and we are probably going to go “the nude route” this time since we haven’t had the time to gather and organize a proper “costume” for the theme. We expect to have a wonderful time — and that all of our fellow guests will quickly join us by ditching their costumes as the party goes on. Although nude is always an option at the start of the party, we’ve yet to attend one where everyone didn’t wind up nude by the end of the party! That is, after all, the one great advantage of attending a nudist party!

What’s your preference for a nudist party with friends? Nude, costumed or clothed? Discuss and share your experiences with other nudists from around the world in The Nude Life Forum!

Today we had a special treat.

A nudist friend of ours is also a Licensed Massage Therapist. We’ve known him for years, well before he earned his LMT certificate, and in fact we had massages from him while he was still an LMT student. We made an appointment with him today to come to our house and do a one-hour massage on each of us at our home — a special treat for me, but more of a necessity for my wife who is recovering from surgery and can benefit from the tissue stimulation.

With temperatures here in North Texas near 80F (26C), bright sunlight and no breeze to speak of, it was a perfect opportunity to take our massages outside, poolside, in the shade of the early afternoon sun dappling through the trees. We turned on some soothing music on the outdoor speakers, and set the water sprays in the pool gurgling in the background.

Our friend set up his massage table and we were soon ready for an hour of splendid pampering. Since all three of us are nudists, and since he is a trained and licensed professional, we agreed that there was no need for the silly and cumbersome ‘draping’ usually used by masseuses to cover their client’s more delicate areas, and so we had the luxury of enjoying the experience nude in the warm afternoon air.

It wasn’t our first nude massage, of course. We’ve had many over the years, and none better than at Club Orient in St. Martin, where massages are available from their expert staff on the magnificent beach there. Our last nude massages before today were on the nude cruise in February of 2007 aboard the Holland America Maasdam, which you can read about in The Nude Life Forum.

A nude massage is wonderfully relaxing, of course, but also a lot less hassle for the client and the therapist. No fussing with “drapes,” less laundry to do afterwards, and of course less stress for both parties as there is no concern about which bits are visible at what times. Each party can concentrate on their part of the experience fully, with no unnecessary textiles getting in between.

And needless to say, enjoying a nude massage outdoors on a warm fall day is one more exquisite benefit of being a nude telecommuter!

The average working stiff slaves away for months at a time, eagerly awaiting those precious few days of vacation that are so eagerly anticipated. For us, the vast majority of those vacation weeks over the past 14 years (since we ‘officially’ became nudists) have been spent on nude vacations. Looking back over the years, it’s easier now to count up the non-nude vacations we’ve had in that time — they have indeed been the exception and not the rule.

Each of those weeks or days of nude vacationing were special, each one memorable, each one the ‘trip of a lifetime,’ as we have often said to ourselves during each of them. We have been very fortunate to have had so many wonderful experiences on so many nude vacations, and now it’s always our first thought when planning a getaway: can we go somewhere nude?

And what strikes us during each one, is that there are a few moments or a few hours that are so exquisite, so luxurious, so memorable, that they are the highlight of the trip and comprise the single most vibrant memory we’ll cherish of that particular journey:

• Dangling our feet in the surf at Half Moon Cay while enjoying that spectacular private island nude with our 1,200 shipmates on the M/S Maasdam
• Dancing and partying on the nude catamaran ‘booze cruise’ during a spectacular sunset in Cozumel
• SCUBA diving nude for a week in the sparkling Bahamas during a chartered “Buff Divers” group trip on a liveaboard dive ship
• Playing volleyball nude on deck with a dozen other happy nudists while at sea during a nude cruise, with the endless blue Caribbean all around

All of those and so many more incredible moments are the moments that make a whole year’s work worth the trouble, to be able to enjoy such freedom in beautiful surroundings and with lots of other fun-loving folks.

There really is nothing else like it.

Read the full 10-part report from the 1,200 passenger nude cruise on the M/S Maasdam in February, 2007 — and share your nude vacation memories — in The Nude Life Forum.

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.

A colleague at work was recounting a cruise they recently completed — a two-week Alaska itinerary as part of a ship repositioning for the winter months. They went on and on about how much better this cruise was than any other they had taken, because for the year prior to the cruise, they had ‘met’ other shipmates via Internet bulletin boards, and so by the time the embarked, they already felt like they had a dozen or more ‘friends’ on board with them.

She regaled us with tales of all the fun they had together with their new-found friends, who had been introduced to each other only online prior to boarding, but who felt like “old chums” since they had been in touch with each other for many months in advance. They had a ball, she told us, enjoying cocktail parties, shore excursions, dinner parties and more together — even a semi-risqué “pajama party” one night.

It was all we could do to appear envious. “Welcome to our world,” we thought. If she only knew…

In fact, she has no idea what we’re used to from our 10 nude cruise vacations. Each one seems better than the one before, because in fact many hundreds of the same friendly, fun-loving people are on the nude cruises year after year, and so we have literally spent weeks and weeks at sea with many of our nude cruising shipmates. Soon after embarking (or even while standing in the terminal house before embarkation), faces from cruises past are recognized and names and warm welcomes are exchanged…hugs aren’t hard to come by, either. We have spent so many wonderful times with so many of those nudist cruisers over the years that it really is like cruising with a shipload of your best friends.

My 10-part blog about our latest nude cruise in February of this year is online here (scroll to the middle of the listing for February, 2007) — and here’s one of our group photos from that cruise, taken at the bow of the ship with a few hundred of our nude cruising friends.

It really is true that once you try a nude cruise, you’ll never go back to textile cruises if you can help it. Literally everything is better about nude cruises. More on this subject in future posts — but for now, we’re glad our work friend got a taste of some of the fun that nudism brings to cruising — without even knowing it — and perhaps, if she’s lucky, someday she’ll know the full story!

Do you have a story about how nude recreation or the nude life has changed your perception of how the “other folks” live? Share it in The Nude Life Forum!