Lovngrandma, I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. We moved there when I was almost 5 and I moved away at 18-1/2. My dad was more into fishing than the beach, so I don't recall going much with him. After my parents divorced when I was 10 though, mom's boyfriend would take us to the beach with floats to ride the waves. That was the beach to me as a child. Our favorite place to go was Huguenot Park, which is at the beginning of the Inter-coastal Waterway. The waterfront of the park is shaped like a cursive U, with the inside being where the waves were. To the left of that was a quiet section where you could wade and watch the windsurfers, and on the right of the waves was a sea wall with a quiet area that was very deep. It's across the water from Mayport Naval Base, and if you were there at the right time, you could watch the aircraft carriers come and go from their long deployments or the carriers bringing loads of cars in from overseas. The quiet sections were also magnets for jellyfish. They would hatch their babies on the left side, and go to the right side to beach themselves to die. We were always fascinated with the live ones, how you could watch everything their bodies did internally.
The first time we went to the beach in Denmark, it was a tiny beach close to my boyfriend's brother's house. The kids had bunches of jellyfish in buckets and were swimming among them like it was nothing. I just couldn't make myself get in, even though they weren't the stinging kind, because of my experiences at Huguenot Park as a child.