A beach is a beach is a beach, but don't tell that to half the people who frequent some of Miami's more popular shoreline. There's the beach meant for showing off your latest gym/elective surgery achievements in the tiniest spandex. There's the beach for families with six kids all in water wings. There's the beach for teenagers in Kendall to drive to while armed with digital cameras for Facebook pics and radios blasting La Kalle. Whichever it is, everyone seems overly excited to be at the beach, like it's some sort of exclusive event and not a mound of waterside sand.

For us, though, a beach is nothing more than a place to sleep off a hangover and avoid vampire skin. After weeks spent in a cubicle, and most weekends sleeping well past noon, we set the alarm extra-early once a month to make sure our skin tone doesn't become translucent. It's practically a civic duty to keep up a base tan in this town, but we're not one for proper man-scaping and we tend to get annoyed by impromptu beach jam sessions or volleyball games. So we cruise the northern parts of Collins Avenue until we come upon a cheap parking spot. More often than not, that's in Bal Harbour (metered parking behind the strip mall at 95th Street and Harding Avenue). Most time here, for us anyway, is spent passed out, and there's nothing that really gets in the way of that. It's just a beach and that's all.