Surprise field trip to the beach

This morning I confirmed that I could set up the Mom's Breastaurant booth at the Santa Cruz Fairgrounds today for the weekend's Berry Festival. It seemed to be a better idea to make the drive an extra time than to get up WAY EARLY on Saturday to get to the fairgrounds and set things up before the event started. And, if I packed up all our gear and the kids and I were then in Watsonville, well, we were in spitting distance to a beach. So I packed up all our gear and off we went.

I'd never driven over 152 before. It's a bit twisty. Happily, the twisty bit is only 8 miles long.

We spent some time at the fairgrounds getting our space assignment and setting up the booth and furniture. Then we headed for the sand and the waves. We ended up at the New Brighton State Beach.

It was less crowded than the trip to the Santa Cruz beach the week before. Yay! There was TONS more seaweed on the beach. Not so yay. We walked along the beach for probably a mile, getting toes wet, then getting ankles wet, then going for it and getting bellies wet. Well, the kids did. I stopped at the ankles :)

We found a few shells. We saw pelicans circling lazily overhead, then DIVE *straight* down into the water after a fish. We saw gazillions of seagulls circling like a tornado over the water, presumably over a giant school of fish. We saw a small dead crab. As we were investigating that a man noticed the impromptu biology lesson and asked if we'd seen the dead ray. Um, no! Where?! So he took us over to it and we looked at a dead stingray. The barbs on it's tail looked like rose thorns. We took a good look, then flipped him over and saw his mouth and nostrils. I need to go find some good clips of stingrays on YouTube ...

We walked back along the beach and passed a group of people talking excitedly about dolphins and pointing a ways offshore. I looked and didn't see anything and figured they were wrong, but as I kept walking I kept hearing folks and seeing them point. Eventually I saw something, but I thought it was more likely a seal than a dolphin. I didn't see the dorsal fin, just a dark, lithe body and a flipper, twisting back into the water. We kept walking. We were just to the point of the beach where we needed to turn our backs on the water and head across the sand to the stairs back up to the parking lot when one of the kids dropped something and I turned around ...

And saw a dolphin leaping out of the water.

Holy deep-fried-pickles, Batman! There is really a whole pod of dolphins playing a couple hundred yards out from the beach!

So the kids and I stayed a bit longer, looking. Sayer said she saw one, and I pointed out their spray a time or two. Duncan didn't see them. Ah, well. He had fun at the beach. So did Sayer. And so did I. :)