We will be going to Disney World over spring break (YIKES). I want to spend a day at the beach. My teen sons like waves, I like sun, my husband likes to sit in the shade of an umbrella near a restaurant. I also prefer no cars on the beach. Can we find all of those things at Ormond Beach? If not, where can we find them. I do want want to go to Daytona over SB. Thanks so much.
There are plenty of areas that are non driving along the Ormond Beacg area so you should be fine :-)
The county government's beach safety site has driving maps, among lots of other information.
Ormond Beach is a spiffier community than neighboring Daytona Beach, whose central beachside neighborhood is something of a slum. I wouldn't rate Ormond as an eastern Cannon Beach (the town of Melbourne Beach might qualify that way--I drove by someone's brand new beachfront mansion a couple of days ago), and Daytona Beach is not nearly as nice as Lincoln City, except for the beach itself and some of the beachfront hotels.
By SB, do you mean South Beach/Miami Beach? That's a long drive from Orlando, on the order of four hours.
A Daytona Beach option for sitting near a restaurant (or bar) would be to set up at the Ocean Deck. It's on a no-driving portion of the beach. Parking is not so great, a substantial walk from Sun Splash Park, which is also the lifeguard headquarters.
http://www.oceandeck.com/daytona/
Another alternative north of town would be Michael Crotty Bicentenial Park. But there's no restaurant.
This list of beaches is a bit hard to find via the county website:
In April, the water will be a bit warmer farther south (Cocoa Beach, Melbourne beaches). As for waves, the National Weather Service has a useful forecast every morning:
forecast.weather.gov/product.php…
April is not a good month for waves, but one can always hope for an offshore storm. The Atlantic doesn't produce east or southeast-travelling swells that are in any way comparable to what comes across the Pacific toward Oregon, and forecasting surf seems far more difficult than around the Pacific.
Thank you both for so much good information and links.
BlueRusso, it was fun for me to read that you are familiar with our local beaches and that you could compare Florida's to ours. I was too lazy to type out "spring break" again, so I abbreviated it SB. Sorry for the confusion. The waves don't have to be huge, my boys just have more fun in waves than if the water is calmer (as it is on the gulf side).
I've spent most of my adult life in Florida, but lived in Portland for a while, putting a lot of miles on the car, going to places like Otter Rock and Pacific City.
The most reliable places for waves are in the Daytona-New Smyrna Beach area (NSB is finally getting attention as a top beach/surfing town) and the coast from Cocoa Beach to Sebastian Inlet, which has a jetty. The boys might have some fun checking the Magic Seaweeed website for "swell consistency" at the "stormrider guide" section of local surf predictions for Florida vs. Oregon. We look awful.
Daytona's beach is wide, gently sloping, and is mostly fine sand. The five or six foot tidal range helps keep the beach broad. The waves tend to be "mushy" in Florida-speak, "spilling" rather than "plunging" in more formal terminology. From Ormond northward, the beaches are narrower and have more shell. Cocoa and Melbourne are not too different from Daytona. The turtle nesting beaches a bit farther south are a bit steeper. I wish I had a mental guide to beachside restaurants in that area.
