Caribbean beach vacations are “indulgent, lazy, and uneducational”—but that’s the appeal, said Nicole Krauss in Condé Nast Traveler. After years of traveling only to challenging locales like the Arctic or postwar Sarajevo in search of revelatory experiences, I finally realized that there might be nothing wrong with a vacation whose purpose was simple escape and recuperation. “To want only to be removed from it all—was that really so much to ask?”
Before catching our flight to Turks and Caicos, our family had to get used to friends “going into paroxysms about the extraordinary color of the water” surrounding this archipelago in the southern Bahamas. In truth, the “startling electric blue” of the sea didn’t disappoint, but its clarity is its more important feature, allowing sunlight to nurture one of the largest barrier reefs in the world. Amid all the angelfish, parrot fish, and eagle rays on display, my favorite sighting was a sea turtle that “graced me with its company” as I snorkeled alone one day. Its “beauty and fragility” haunted me long afterward. Such wonderful moments became routine. By a beach bonfire, my oldest son saw the moon through a telescope for the first time, along with Venus and Jupiter with its moons. Another day, his brother spent hours in the ocean learning the fine art of floating.
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