One of the last refuges for a really easy-going vacation is a beach. A long stretch of white sand, blue water, warm sun and gentle breezes can undo the tension in anyone. It’s fun, restorative, relaxing and doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Certainly beach vacations in distant places like Thailand and South Africa, are costly options for those of us living in Europe or North America, but there are lots of affordable beach vacations to be found.

A great place to start is by checking out the authoritative beach website, www.beach.org. It devotes a page per beach and details what makes each individual beach unique. And it’s not just about exotic locales, either. Beach.org showcases beaches all around the world, some on our own backyards.

For example, people in the Canadian province of Ontario will be thrilled to discover beaches with thick white sand, sun and fun on the shores of Lake Huron at Sauble Beach. The small town atmosphere ensures an affordable beach vacation; you can choose from inexpensive motels or ample camping spots to ensure you save money on your visit. It’s about a 2-hour drive north of Toronto, so you won’t even use much gas getting there. The same is true of Cobourg Beach, an idyllic spot in a historic small city just an hour east of Toronto.

Staying in Canada for a moment, the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia has 4700 miles of coastline on the Atlantic Ocean and Bay of Fundy. It is littered with beaches, some sandy, some rocky, all spectacular. Mavillette Beach is very popular among locals. It’s long, with deep sand and a protective ring of low shrubs surrounding it. Being on the Bay of Fundy, Mavillette Beach also offers that visual spectacle of the highest and lowest tides in the world. Mavillette Beach is easy to access from Maine; a ferry crosses The Bay of Fundy from Saint John, New Brunswick (close to the Maine border), to Digby, Nova Scotia (home of the world’s best scallops!) in 3 hours, and then it’s a short drive to dozens of beaches in the area. Mavillette Beach is about 2 hours by car from Halifax and its international airport. Visitors from the eastern seaboard of the U.S.A. frequent Nova Scotia’s beaches, and find this affordable beach vacation to be easy on the wallet, even when they factor in food, accommodations and watersports.

In America, there are also lots of beaches to visit. The big ones, like Virginia Beach, Miami Beach and Huntingdon Beach tend to be very busy and pretty expensive. Affordable beach vacations in the U.S.A. can be found at beach.org; it’s easy to locate potential beaches because the site is divided into world regions. While searching for affordable beach vacations, don’t forget that some of the countries in Central America are emerging as fairly safe and very inexpensive havens for beach tourism. Panama, for example, has become a choice destination of an affordable beach vacation. Belize and Costa Rica are cost-effective and safe; Honduras, San Salvador and Nicaragua have worked to ensure their crime issues do not extend to their resorts, but be sure to find a package, all-inclusive deal so that you stay at the resort itself.

Mexico, if you stay away from the big, famous places like Cozumel and Cancun, offers some very inexpensive beach holidays, but you need to do thorough homework to ensure these more remote locations are safe and that the accommodations are at least adequate, if not luxurious. And there are smaller beaches on islands like Cozumel that are much less busy and much more affordable.

An affordable beach vacation is always east expensive if you can pitch your tent on the beach and cook your own food over a fire. Look to the many beaches of the Greek Island of Corfu for exceptional beaches where you can camp. Those and many more are to be discovered on beach.org. We highly recommend it as an affordable beach vacation resource.