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Where in the metro do you think the beaches in Seattle are? There are some I guess around Lake Washington where the water is decent in the summer, but even so, mostly not sand beaches and more like grass lawns next to water. There’s Alki Beach and Golden Gardens and some beach-y areas in Snohomish County like Edmonds, but the water on the sound is cold year round. The ocean beaches are hours away and are beautiful but usually cool and foggy throughout the year and the water is freezing.
If the CSA is included, Grand Rapids. Lots of great beaches between Saugatuck and Grand Haven. None of those are in the metro area though.
Scattered randomly along the coast and some islands. I am not all that familiar with the Seattle area.
Indiana Dunes
North Shore suburb beaches (docked a point because some of them are residents-only)
Chain of Lakes beaches in Lake County
For scenic beaches, sure. For swimming, not a chance. The only people swimming in Puget Sound have wetsuits on, and most of the rivers and lakes in the area are freezing even on hot days because they're filled with glacial runoff (and because western WA isn't consistently warm enough in the summer to heat them up). When I lived up there, I always went east of the Cascades if I wanted to do any real swimming (Coeur d'Alene, Snake River, Moses Lake).
I forgot about the needing a wetsuit to swim, as you even need a wetsuit to swim in the LA area.
I’d reluctantly have to go with Galveston here as a suburb of Houston.
Hard disagree there. Galveston is disgusting. Port Aransas (Corpus Metro) used to be okay but has gotten quite bad itself. I think South Padre is the only Texas beach that is decent.
Charleston, SC would have to rank high on this list. Within 10 miles of old town Charleston you can be on beautiful clean sand beaches with clean Atlantic Ocean water at three barrier islands - Isle of Palms, Sullivan's Island and Folley Island. I emphasize clean, because beaches near some metro areas often don't have soft, clean sand and clean ocean water.
Other obvious coastal metros on the list would be Virginia Beach, VA and Wilmington, NC. I was not very impressed with the beach outside Savannah, GA, but Hilton Head SC is not far north of there.
Philly has beaches? Where? On the Delaware River? Are we counting the Jersey Shore?
I think it's kind of a stretch to consider the Jersey Shore part of the Philly metro even if the ever-expansive CSA definition includes some of those counties. If you have to drive across open country to get there..you're no longer in the "metro" IMO.
And it depends on whether you're using MSA or CSA. I was kind of lumping the Cape/Islands in with "suburban Boston" earlier. The Providence area's bread and butter would be MA's South Coast, Block Island, and South County RI. Moreso than Newport, which to my knowledge doesn't have many sandy beaches around it.
I'm sure there are some nice, sandy beaches in MA, mind you (and I'm much less familiar with North Shore beaches). We went to Old Silver beach in Falmouth last summer, and you had to walk over 30 feet of rocks in the water to get to the sand bar. Nice beach otherwise though. The outer Cape is of course sandy being a sand bar itself, but a hike from Boston.
But at least relative to Long Island and especially the Jersey Shore, which are largely barrier islands / sand bars, they're relatively rocky. Nothing is as rocky as Maine though (and I love Maine).
Someone mentioned Texas in particular the border with Mexico. What about the Houston/Galveston area? Or Corpus Christi?
I been thinking arent there bound to be lots of gators in the Southeast beachers.
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