A Swinky Month at the Beach

Welcome to the new normal

The ongoing pandemic continues to wreak havoc with everyone’s social lives and vacation plans. As the global pandemic geared up, our group of friends here at Swinky Life began to seriously consider how this might impact us. From our workshops that we hoped to do at several lifestyle conferences, to our own vacation plans we already had booked for our own kinky sexcapades, everything was changing.

As we got into April, things were definitely not looking to be better by the end of the summer. We began accepting that we would likely not be presenting anywhere this year, and we began canceling our own vacation plans. This made us very sad, and we scrambled to see what fun we could salvage.

It is worth mentioning here that when I say we, I am referring to our quaranteaming social bubble that we established early on; for the details on this, read this post. The short version is, we were not looking to go have fun with lots of other sexy people at this point; we just wanted some kind of break to say we did something fun with the summer.

What to do…

We hit upon the idea of potentially renting a beach house, if such a thing were even possible. We looked around and found one about 20 minutes from where we live and began talking with the owner. After a bit of discussion, we crafted an agreement that we would rent the house for 5 weeks, which is technically not a short term vacation rental, with the understanding that if, by our arrival date, things got worse, we would not be obligated.

Things actually began looking better in late May, and some countries began relaxing restrictions, so we moved into our beach house. We hoped for a good month, and hoped that perhaps by the end of it all, things would be more cheerful. Many of our conferences were rescheduling for later in the year, and for this brief moment in time, it looked like the year would end up better than we thought.

Our Time on the Beach

For five glorious weeks, the four of us lived in the beach house, almost 95% kid free (we invited them over for dinner once a week or so). While we did take some actual vacation time, with everyone working from home, even just being together, on the beach, in a new context that was kid free, pet free, free of all the things you see when you are at home that nag and bother… it was wonderful.

We spent every evening on the beach, rain or shine. Well, almost every evening… there was that one evening when we all 4 ended up in bed together for several long, hard, sweaty hours. We did lots of rope work, practicing our basic knots and cinches and frictions. We developed exercises for our workshops, and came up with new and creative couple ties for that series of workshops. We did this all in the hopes that someday soonish this pandemic would be a thing of the past, and we could all get back to our normal lives. We started doing self suspensions, something that was new and fun for us. Of course, there was also some impact play and some bruised butts over the month. And sex… lots of amazing sex.

Our bartending skills got much better, and we created a few custom drinks that will soon give rise to a whole new section of this website. We worked on podcasts for Myrina and Tristan’s other site, The Accidental Swingers. We got up almost every morning, and did a 2 mile interval training run up and down the beach. Inasmuch as you can live fully and enjoy it during the lockdown, we did.

The Final Sunset

While, at some points in our stay, it actually would have been allowed for us to go to bars, clubs, and restaurants, we did not. For us, things were not at a place where we felt comfortable with that. Even as I am writing this now, almost a month after our stay, things are still getting drastically worse for Florida every day.

But beyond that sad truth, we had a great time. And that is a big part of what made it a Swinky Month. Because a big part of the Swinky philosophy is taking something that other people look at as unpleasant (such as this pandemic), and finding a way to make it enjoyable, and then sharing that.

We hope you are all finding your own ways to make this time not just bearable, but actually fun. We hope you have found your own social bubble at this point, and are beginning to find a new groove in this strange current world. And we hope that, when the dust settles, you will be up for exploring other, potentially new, fun things. And we hope to see you at some conference, even though at this rate that may be next year.

Till then, stay safe, and keep it Swinky!