It just takes two 90 degree days in Washington, DC, to have one’s dreams turn to Rehoboth. I am lucky to be able to come to Rehoboth all year long, but there is nothing like that first really warm spring weekend when you can actually sit on the beach for the first time of the season. Sitting with a book on a near empty beach and listening to the waves break on the shore is the best medicine for anything that ails one.

For just a few precious moments one can forget the war in Iraq, the fight for gay marriage, the need to preserve the right to choose and even poverty in the world. I may feel a little guilty afterwards as I again face the world and realize that there are many people who can never forget these issues, but it’s my few moments of living the Anthony Newley play, Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, and there is no better place than Rehoboth to do that.

I have been coming here for twenty years now, "yikes I’m getting old!", but it always has that effect on me. I can join in the bitching about overcrowding, traffic, poor community planning, aggressive real estate agents selling yet to be built dream developments, (not my friends of course), and rising costs. But it all seems on a different scale than in what I consider the real world. Rehoboth retains its small town charm for all.

The real world of Rehoboth is the discussion of the new GLBT community center that is being planned in great detail by CAMP Rehoboth. The great strategic planning session held in April when over 80 people took time on their Saturday morning to discuss the future of the Center and our community. But even this meeting of the minds was much more genteel and calm, over a nice breakfast at the Sands Hotel, than it would have been had it been held back in DC or Baltimore.

The real world of Rehoboth revolves around discussions on why the City Commissioners didn’t address the traffic issues before they became obscene, the traffic, not the Commissioners. Why didn’t the planners of Canal Corkran realize, before they built their beautiful new community, that the traffic coming out of their development this summer will surely cause new swear words to be added to the English language and a new level of Rehoboth road rage. How about that great new two lane entrance to Rehoboth Beach being built by DelDot? Surely it took geniuses to figure out how to time the building of that road project at the same time as the one from Rehoboth to Dewey beach.

The real world of Rehoboth revolves around how much noise one can make when enjoying the great restaurants and bars before you set off the noise meters and bring out the noise police. First Delaware passes its forward looking and sane, anti-smoking laws, and then the Rehoboth Beach Commission tries to figure out how to make life difficult for those restaurants and bars that pay the taxes here, by challenging them when their patrons who still want to smoke must do so in the street.

But Rehoboth reality is also that when sitting on the deck at Java Beach, or in the mews at The Coffee Mill, those issues seem to recede from memory. Have lunch in the courtyard of CAMP at Lori’s, or at SOB across from the new Aqua, move on to happy hour at the Blue Moon and a late night drink at Cloud 9, and all your tensions and cares seem to melt away.

For those of us who come from far and wide to enjoy Rehoboth, and far and wide often being Washington, DC, Baltimore or Philly, it’s exciting that every time we arrive we find another one of our friends has moved to Rehoboth fulltime. The most recent friend of mine who has made the big move is Bob Bonitati, a DC denizen if there ever was one. Having moved through all his incarnations from White House Aide to owner of Birds florist to PR executive extraordinaire, he has now retired to enjoy the life of leisure in Rehoboth. As with many new Rehoboth residents, that includes working part time from the beach. What a nice life. He will most likely add years to his life as he can now slow down to existence in lower slower Delaware, as the residents of this part of the world happily refer to their home.