Beach Day Must Haves

May 26, 2017 by amber

*This one and the next two were all taken by Atticus 😉 I love seeing his perspective on life!

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We’re approaching 6 months here on Oahu. It seems like just the other day we turned over our keys to our NYC apartment and jumped on an 11 hour flight. It’s been a pretty wild adventure. We’ve had some of the most memorable experiences here. I know we’ll always look back at this time fondly.

We try to make it to the beach as a family every day. Not necessarily for full on beach days, but at for at least morning walks with Chauncey or to watch sunset. But at least once a week we try to do a full beach day. We’ll pick a new beach we want to see, or go to one of our favorites and spend a good portion of the day. We quickly found that we were always super unsorganized, lugging stuff back and forth to the beach so we came up with a system with all our beach gear and honestly it’s made our beach trips so much more enjoyable. We can load up, set up and tear down in minutes. Partly due to the fact that we have everything in one place, but also because we’ve narrowed down our necessities. After many beach trip fails where we realized we either forgot something, or packed too much, we now know exactly what we need so I thought I’d share with you our must have beach gear for the ultimate beach trip.

Beach wagon – We have the Beach Comber and this is a must for us. It’s great for so many reasons. We actually just pile all of our other gear in the wagon and leave it there when we aren’t using it, so it doubles as our beach storage when we’re not at the beach. It’s also great for easy transport in and out of the car. David just wheels it up, picks it up with everything in it, and puts it in the back of the mini van, fully unfolded and full. Or you can collapse it down to store it out of the way and fit it into smaller car trunks. Both the kids can fit in the wagon too, and when dragging all your stuff to the beach, you usually don’t have free hands so that’s really helpful, and they love it. But Atticus usually likes to pull it anyway. It has huge wheels for the sand which is necessary but the front two wheels are a little too close together in my opinion, so you have to be careful not to tip it over. But it’s the best sand wagon we’ve encountered. Most other collapsible wagons have wheels that are way too narrow.
Umbrella – David actually found this Neso tent online and we love it – our favorite beach purchase! I think he mainly just gets a kick out of the fact that every time we use it, people stop to ask him about it. It’s pretty genius and so easy to set up. Each corner has a tether and a stretch sand bag as an anchor. So you fill up all 4 bags and prop it up the two poles, kind of in whatever configuration you want depending on the wind and sun direction. It does great in wind too. Not too heavy of wind, but by that time, if it’s that windy, we’ve probably already left. When the wind is too heavy though, you can also just bury the bags on the windward side, like we ended up doing in this post. It handled the wind like a champ. We also have this Sunday Supply co umbrella that I love. You may have seen it in this post.. It’s a little bigger but it’s beautiful and really strong. You may remember when we were at Makua Beach, before we had this one and the story of our flimsy umbrella and how it blew into the ocean and we had to fish it out. This one does a lot better!
Beach blanket – I love this one I got from Nordstrom. Mainly because its colorful, lightweight, and folds up nice and small.
Towels – Also from Nordstrom, one of the first purchases I made when we got here and we use them almost every day. I actually also really like these Dock & Bay ones too. At first I was a little thrown off because the material isn’t exactly soft, comforting towel material, more a microfiber. But they dry great, work amazing as wraps, and break the wind really nicely. We did a boat ride/snorkel the other week and it was freezing after and I wrapped it around me and couldn’t feel any of the wind on the ride back.
Cooler – I love our Sunnylife cooler because yeah it’s so cute, but also because it’s tall, so it doesn’t take up a lot of space in the wagon. It works great. We actually travel with it occasionally too.
Beach bag – I got this one from Shopbop (now sold out there) during their sale before we came to Hawaii. I love it because it is colorful and has a drawstring canvas closure on top. There are TONS of cute ones similar on Shopbop, Revolve, and Nordstrom. LOVE this one, this one, and this one!
Water bottles – I know vacuum insulated water bottles are all the rage right now, and for good reason. They work. We love Hydro flask and have them in pretty much every style. We love the ones with wide mouth and the sport cap.
Speakers – We got the UE Roll for our trip to Jamaica, which also doubled as sound machine. So by day it’s your water proof boom box and by night, you can blue tooth your favorite sound machine app from your phone for your sleeping babies.
Sand toys – We have this cute Melissa & Doug baking sand toy set and both the kids love it. Basically love anything Melissa & Doug

It’s kind of a lot of stuff, but with the wagon it works so well. Hope this helps you have great and easy summer beach trip!

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