Waiting in the sun

We camped out all day in the resort beach chairs. Commandeering the cabana boy first thing in the morning, just as he was hauling the canvas chaises longues out of the storage hutch, we had our pick of spots on the sugar-fine sand.

Hidden beneath our spacious umbrellas, shielded from the blistering sun, we watched sunburnt tourists building tottering sandcastles, and sandpipers digging for surf clams.

Frommer’s ranked this stretch of Florida’s coast as the most beautiful in the contiguous United States. What we needed was a rating for which vacation spot was best for rekindling cold home fires.