Queen's Birthday weekend

Another long weekend means another happy few days at the beach, especially when I took an extra day off (to avoid traffic, I tell myself, but really it's just for another day's holiday) and had a proper break. It was freezing and windy but who cares! The sun shone, mostly, and I sewed a bit in the mornings - successfully this time - and went for walks in the afternoon. I seem to have all of my puff back which is a relief. This is me trying to use the panorama function on my phone. It just seems to distort it, I don't think I'm doing it right.

This is from Sunday I went to a beach about half an hour to the north, where we used to come and stay with friends back when the kids were very tiny. I took a nostalgia drive past their old house, and the boat ramp on the lake where we would make mud puddles for hours and look at tiny fish, then I went out to the main beach. While I was parking I wondered why I had no memory of this beach, and did we never go there? And then I went out onto the beach and remembered EXACTLY why we never took the children there, and didn't even swim there ourselves. It is unpatrolled and long and exposed and wild. Admittedly there was a super swell on the weekend, but even at its calmest that is one scary beach. 

I went for a long walk up to where the lake outlet is. You could throw a tennis ball across the lake entrance to the north side, which is lovely and more sheltered, but it's nearly half an hour by road. There are endangered shore birds that I can't name but enjoyed watching, and a couple of people shore fishing who didn't seem to be catching anything. This is the lake, and where we spent most of our time paddling, nearly twenty years ago (gulp).

And then I went around to a more sheltered beach that I hadn't been to for just over 19 years - and I remember it because it was number one's first birthday - Easter Sunday - and we were there with our friends with the house, and other friends came down, and we had a picnic at this peaceful little bay. 

The moon was coming up and the temperature was dropping, so time to go home for slippers and sparkling wine. Excellent weekend.