This is the dream, y'all.

It’s the American barrier island dream location. Fort Walton Beach.

Our balcony at the Nautilus Court looks down upon an endless strand of white sugar sand. Caster sugar sand, really. It is very fine.

It squeaks to you as you walk upon it.

And, unlike Australian

white sand, it does not get hot in the scorching sun. It is soft, silky, comfortable. It is because it is all limestone, crumbs from shells and coral, says Bruce. Ironically there are not many shells on the beach. Just tiny cockles.

Blue beach chairs and umbrellas are set out in perfect symmetry every morning for our use. It has been a dream of mine to sit upon a beach

like this in this style. Now I realise the dream. Chandler, the sun-bronzed chair boy, checks us off on his list, ensuring there are no sneaky outsiders stealing our Nautilus sun spots. Chandler does all the work of bringing the chairs out and putting them back each day. I love the Florida sun. It feels soft. Nonetheless, I dip into the sea at regular intervals. It is a warm sea. Gulf of Mexico sea.

We are on Okaloosa Island in a place called Fort Walton Beach. I found it in one of my trawls for good places to stay when Bruce said to look for a beach location in the Florida panhandle. It’s a bit of a coup.

I am besotted. Bruce is besotted.

We have a bedroom each, for starters. I have the

bright sea view room at the front and Bruce has what he likes to call the Man Cave at the back. I can stay awake as long as I like with no fear Bruce will be disturbed. Bruce can sleep as early as he likes and not be disrupted by his night owl wife.

We also have a long, spacious living room with two fabulous recliner chairs plus dining table and sofa. And

an excellent kitchen, plus a sophisticated laundry. Not to mention the most heavenly balcony with sun lounges, table, and chairs. We lack for nothing. And the view is simply exquisite - the emerald sea and the white sand. They call this The Emerald Coast and once one sees the sea, one realises it is right. It is emerald green.

Our days here show us the sea with small surf, patches of weed, and undertow, and the sea dead calm, crystal clear with a wealth of silvery fish of all sizes meandering

comfortably through the shallows. Jellyfish visit, too. Swimmers call out and bring curious sunbathers to stand warily in the water around them to look and photograph. There’s an Asian family in our beach area. They are down from 7am each day doing every possible thing you can do on the beach, from paddle boarding and body surfing to netting fingerlings and burying each other deep in the sand for hours on end.

They manage to net a decent meal of good-sized crabs right in front of us. The Americans are fascinated and come up to look admiringly into their bucket.

These few days are my idea of bliss. I feel brown and fit.

In the cool of a morning, we take a walk on the low-tide hard sand at the water’s edge down to the Okaloosa jetty. We pass one after another array of beach chairs and sunshades, each one impeccably

lined up near the water, each representing a different condo or hotel community. Mostly they are blue or green, but one is black and another non-conformist, deep purple. Just as the sand dunes along the beach are uniformly adorned with wooden wind-breaks and sand-defenders, so are the chairs and umbrellas of a thoughtfully harmonious aesthetic.

We ponder whether this is centrally controlled by some Fort Walton community authority.

It is further to the jetty than we

thought. Funny thing that. The sand gets softer and the slope of it more extreme, so the walking is harder. I’m kicking myself for not bringing a drink of water. There are no shops or cafes on the foreshore. Just condos and hotels. Finally we find a refreshment stand right on the pier itself. Rather a crude fisherman’s shop, really, with bait and ice cream and drink machines - oh, and a loo. We might have strolled down the jetty which is lined with fantastic heron sculptures on the light poles but there is a $2 charge and something deep within the Aussie psyche balks at being charged to walk a jetty.

We sit and rest for a while with a cold drink at a table outside a foreshore bar and then make the

return trip past all these worlds of Americans at play on their gorgeous beach. Back at our blue beach chairs, we look at our iPhones and discover we have just walked 6.2km.

We take only one expedition - to the nearby barrier island township of Destin, which originally attracted us to visit this part of Florida.

I’m glad we did not stay there. It is lots of fun, lots of touristy, quaint,

characterful activity and a lively little market under the grand hotel.

We go for a wander there, particularly charmed by the water at the marina dock. It is that same pristine green as on our Emerald Coast beach and huge, happy fish swirl around among the pylons, seemingly aware of the No Fishing sign above them.

Fort Walton Beach serves us well. Bruce has a dental filling fall out and the Nautilus management finds him a

wonderful dentist who does the repair job same-day.

I find a beaut nail salon for a revamp of beach toes. This time I get a shimmery green colour adorned with palm trees and a little white seagull. The nail salon is just like all the others all over America and Australia. It is run and worked by Vietnamese girls with very basic English. The only difference I find is that what we call "nail art" in Australia, here they call “design”.

We find a classy Publix supermarket and equip our condo for every meal.

We already are carrying stone-ground grits from Nora Mill in Sautee and muesli from Trishna in Fayetteville. And our usual travelling kitchen of knives and chili sauces, olive oil, olives, booze, and other essentials.

We don’t eat out at all in Fort Walton Beach. We eat on our gorgeous porch watching brown pelicans fly over the sea, spotting the odd pod of

dolphins, the regular passage of the surf rescue bods in their beach- mobiles, the putting out and taking in of the chairs, the rhythm of beach life.

Some day-trippers coming to the public carpark near the condos entertained us no end with the incredibly complicated supplies of beach paraphernalia they lugged down to the shoreline: shade tents, umbrellas, chairs, eskies, inflatables, and boogie boards. Some of them had special soft-wheeled sand carts in which to load their luggage.

Others just made one trip after another at the end of the day, often looking rather the worse for sun exposure.

There are military installations in the vicinity and we have the entertainment of some absolutely intriguing aircraft buzzing or roaring overhead from time to time. A lot of those things with their propellors on the end of their wings. Bruce can identify them all.

Then there is the dune cat. A dear little inky black female cat emerges from somewhere at dusk each night

and comes to talk to us, and anyone who will listen. She is saying that she is hungry. She has obviously had kittens. She is very tame. She is thin. We call her dune cat because she is always there in the dunes where, probably, her diet is the darling little green anole lizards one sees occasionally. Maybe the odd dragonfly. Against all condo rules, I toss some left over bologna off the balcony for her and she quickly finds it. I learn that she is not actually abandoned but has to live outside because of the no pets regulation at a neighbouring condo. Hmm.

There is another mood to the beach each evening at sunset. One of almost gentle reverence. People drift onto the sand and

wander about or just sit quietly on the sand ledge by the water’s edge and wait to watch that great golden orb of sun melt into the horizon in its celebration of glowing red and orange. Each night we watch carefully for the mysterious green sunset flash, but never see it. The thing about Fort Walton Beach is that it is really, really hard to leave. This has been the most comfortable and perfect place on every level.

I wonder if fate might ever bring us back here. I’d like to think it might.