Ten Things I Learned at the Beach

My husband and I had a little get away time at the Oregon Coast this past weekend.  It was a much needed and long awaited for time away from kids, projects and phone calls!  Here are some of the things I learned while I was there.  Some were surprising to me and some were expected but none the less welcome revelations.

1. The first thing I learned at the beach is that there are some comical little birds that run around like cartoons in search of food.  We had so much fun watching them and then learning a little about them.  They appear to be social creatures  running to and fro in their little flocks.  Their name is sanderlings and from our online research we learned that they breed in the arctic and winter all over the world on beaches.  Here’s a link if you wish to explore a little about them as well. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Sanderling/overview
2. People play! My husband and I have had our noses to the proverbial grind stone for so long that I almost forgot that adults actually play sometimes. Our time at the beach coincided with a kite festival which was really fun to watch and a good reminder of a fun adult leisure time activity. There were probably fifty people with varying shapes and sizes of kites. A gentleman was measuring the wind speed before hoisting his kite and many people sat enjoying the view of these multi colored, floating attractions. Maybe we should take a break and do a little playing ourselves once and a while!
3. Expect the unexpected, as we walked along the beach enjoying the kite festival and largely ignoring the people, I assumed we were alone in this crowd with no one we knew to distract from each other. I happened to look down from my kite gazing, at the people around me and at the same time, another woman looked my way and I was looking straight in the eyes of one of my cousins who lives on the other side of the state and whom I haven’t seen in nineteen years since our grandmother passed away! We were quickly in each others embrace and held each other for the longest time. We were able to update each other in a short time on our respective families and go on our way.  It truly is a small world cousin!
4. There’s order amidst apparent chaos. Though the crashing thundering waves look so random, they sound so consistent.  According to a website we looked up, 1 in 7 waves is approximately twice as high as its fellows and 3 times in 24 hours there’s a “maximum wave” that is significantly higher. It amazed me that there is a pattern to this apparently random but constant, marching in and out of the waves.
5. The beach is an attraction to people from all demographics. Families with young children played in the sand, teens on surf boards skidded along the beach, older people in their chairs sat to watch the sights. Kite lovers, bird lovers and lovers of all ages roamed the beach, hand in hand or on bicycles. Even loners who wanted to sit and watch and those who wanted to exercise were among those enjoying the ocean atmosphere.
6. You can never get all the Sand out of your shoes. I think I relearn this every time I’m at some kind of sandy beach, which isn’t often. Sand has a way of clinging to whatever it touches. You can wash off your feet and even dry them with a towel before putting your shoes on but you’ll be dumping sand out of your shoes months later.  Even though I was wearing flip flops I brought sand home with me on them.
7. It’s not always cold at the Pacific beach. Most of the time when we’ve been at the beach it has been windy, cloudy and cold. This time we were blessed with a warm October weekend with sunny skies and temperatures in the 60’s, which is warmer than our home temperatures have been for the last few days. People were playing in the water, which, according to a local website, was slightly warmer than the air temperatures. They surfed and waded and just plane enjoyed the unusually warm days. The wind was even almost non existent until late afternoon though I’m sure the kite festival was not as exciting due to that fact.
8. There’s life under the sand. As we meandered down the beach enjoying the waves and sand, we saw little holes in the wet sand and wondered what may be in them. After a bit one of the waves brought a little fellow up to our feet and we watched as he quickly and efficiently burrowed under the sand and left little to no evidence that he was even there. We later asked google who he was and learned that he was a little sand crab or mole crab. They burrow under the sand in the swash zone and use their antennae to feed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerita_(genus)
9. You can fish off the shore of the ocean.  We saw a man standing at the edge of the incoming waves and he was fishing with a rather large fishing pole.  We asked him what he was fishing for and he told us about surf perch.  He said they come in with the waves looking for the little worms that come up out of the sand.  He had a weight that would keep his line at the bottom of the ocean floor and then the bait attached farther up the line so it would float in the water.  He said the perch were 6-12 inches long and pretty good to eat but hard to clean all the bones out of.   https://myodfw.com/articles/how-fish-surfperch
10. Last but not least, I still like my husband!  This was no great surprise of course, however, it never hurts to reaffirm that fact.  We haven’t had the opportunity to be away for the night without children in so long that I’m embarrassed to admit how many years it has been.  We had such a relaxing time.  I think taking time away and letting some of those built up anxieties melt off is a needed part of personal health as well as marrital health and growth!