Seafood, clear liquor and chill tunes? It must be summer.

The ACBN Friday Newsletter is leaving footprints in the sand.

I never used to be a beach person.

Some people have it in them practically from birth. The beach beckons them, calls to them, becomes a fundamental part of their personality and self-image. They collected sea shells when they could barely walk, took spring breaks and then summer vacations there, and hope to retire to somewhere by the sand one day.

Me? I grew up in Cleveland.

That’s not far from a coastline, mind you, but the rocky beaches and tire-filled waters of 1980s Lake Erie didn’t exactly fill me with the beachcomber spirit of Jimmy Buffett. My parents weren’t big on beach vacations, either, and that’s not a complaint—when we took trips, they were to see things, to do things. Lying around on the beach? That just wasn’t in our nature.

The first time I ever really traveled to the beach beach was on my honeymoon a decade ago, when we took a trip to an all-inclusive resort in Cancun primarily because it required the least up-front planning and we had no energy left after months of wedd…