DaedTech Digest: Living Our Life at the Isle of Palms Beach

The Charleston metro area is great, as I briefly described a couple of weeks ago.  And, since then, we’ve seen even more of the city, treating ourselves to some additional excursions and adventures in the city proper.

But today, I’d like to talk about where we’re actually staying, and what life there is like.

We’re in a town called Isle of Palms.  Not surprisingly, it exists on an island — a barrier island, to be exact.  And Isle of Palms is maybe a 15 minute drive from Charleston proper, and 2 towns over.

If you live in or around a major city, you might map this to a bustling suburb, but that’s really not the case.  Charleston is actually quite a small city, and these beach outlying areas really do not feel like suburbs.  They feel like, well, beach destinations.

So it’s like we’re staying in the kind of house you might have gone to with your family as a kid for a beach week during spring or summer vacation.

Living at the Beach

As I mentioned last week, we’re setting aside some time where we’re not going full tourist and not working.  We want to relax.  And, where better than the beach?

So our life here has settled into a nice, sustainable cadence.  We’re working as we normally work, whether at home base or vagabonding, but we’re enjoying more success in not over-doing it.  This, combined with not booking our free time with wall-to-wall excursions, has given us some enormously enjoyable downtime.

And we’re making the most of it.  This has included:

• (At the risk of living a cliche) a lot of long walks on the beach in pursuit of impressive streaks of 10,000 step days.
• Taking chairs down to the beach and reading.
• Having a beer or two at a few different breezy establishments along the coast, while we look out at the ocean.
• (For me only) jogging along the coast every day.

Now, before you think that we’re living the life described in that Beach Boys song that lists every Caribbean destination in existence, understand that it’s actually not super warm here.  Daytime highs have ranged from the mid-50s to the mid-70s.  So a lot of these beach excursions involve shoes, jeans, and a hoodie.

Also, understand that it is apparently “sand gnat” season here.  These things put mosquitoes to shame.  If I’m not careful to put on bug spray for night beach visits, my forearms wind up covered in itchy welts.

So, it’s not tropical vaction.  But it is warm-ish, peaceful, beautiful, quiet, and surprisingly private, for a beach destination at spring break.  We’re packing up to head to Atlanta in about a week.  But our time here at the scenic Isle of Palms beach has been restorative.

Picks

• Here’s a fun thing that happened to me: a mention from Tim Ferris regarding an article I wrote some time back.  It’s in reference to an article from his blog about learning to write code.
• I’ve been poking around and learning about dev.to, which I’m starting to like.  It’s a nice contributor-driven content community, but without the horrible people that such a thing usually attracts if it gets big enough.  In other words, it appears that the community actually enforces human decency.
• Finally, here’s a local spot if you’re ever in Isle of Palms, called the Windjammer.  I mentioned having a beer or two and watching the surf, and there’s no better place to do it.  They have tall chairs facing out of their back patio for exactly that purpose, and they even have a sand volleyball court on their ground floor.

The Digest

• Hey, look — I wrote stuff this week!  Not only did I get back to publishing stuff on the DaedTech blog, but I wrote a post for our entry level programmer site, sharing my opinion on what it takes to be a good software engineer.
• We also published another episode of the Freelancers Show this week, where Jonathan Stark and I discussed the idea of generating leverage with your business by creating systems and standard operation procedures.
• And I uploaded a new Youtube video for Hit Subscribe.  If you want to learn to tell how hard it is to rank for a given search keyword, check it out!

And, as always, have yourselves a great weekend.