Africa probably does not spring to mind as the first destination you would choose when planning a beach holiday, but there are many great reasons to give it a try. Cape Town in South Africa has up until recently always been “the” destination to go to if you wanted to go to Africa and enjoy the beach as well as all the other great things that only this great continent has to offer. Now there are new kids on the block and places like Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania, Mombasa in Kenya and The Gambia have really come in to their own each offering their own unique selling points and flavour of Africa but all great beach holiday destinations.

We moved to Florida when I was only 5, many, many years ago, before it became wall to wall houses, condos and shopping centers. But, about the seashells, moving there from Pennsylvania, the beach appeared to be a wondrous thing, and my parents took us there at least once a week, normally more often that that. At first we would take a few seashells home, but they were in such abundance that eventually we just walked by them, or picked them up, admired them and put them down. During the winter months, you would see tourists, who really knew nothing about seashells, combing the beaches for their bag of shells to take home to the frozen north, so they could remember their sunny vacation in Florida. Looking back all those years, I wish I had spent a few minutes each time we went to the beach to find only 1 or 2 of the best shells to save, but I didn’t.