A little beach teaser.

There will be more to come throughout the week, so stay posted.  I want to put out a few pics at a time since it's easier to tell a story that way and stay with it.  What follows is an account of our beach vacation in Westerly RI and surrounding burgs.

This first batch will just be beach pictures.  This first is from a beach I only went to once on the very first morning after we arrived.  We stayed in a little house, which you will see in future posts, in Westerly, about ten minutes drive from the beach we went to most often.  The picture above is from Misquamicut Beach.  It is a public beach about 3.5 miles from the house.  Obviously, Harrington's do not frequent lifeguarded beaches, but it was very picturesque after the first half of my run.  The second half of my run was done barefoot after I got a blister.  So, for those of you playing at home, that's a 7 mile run after several weeks of sitting on my tuckus in grad school, half of which was done barefoot.  Needless to say, I hobbled around like an old man for a few days after this adventure.  Still, the beach was beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful, here is a picture from later in the day when we all went down to Napatree Beach in Watch Hill, RI.  Look at those lovely ladies playing in the surf!  Bob came out on Tuesday because he had some obligations for work that needed priority, so Jenn and Zhora travelled with Sarah and I, and Veneta met us at the house Sunday night.  I believe I had already gone to bed when Veneta rolled in, but she was ready for some awesome beach action on Monday.  The water was a little chilly at first, but not bad at all and we quickly adapted to it.  We all agreed that the waves were just incredible.  Look for their characteristic perfect curl in the backgrounds of these shots.

Napatree has a long history, which you can read about on wikipedia like I did, if you're interested.  Pertinent information includes that it is essentially an exposed sandbar, very narrow, only about 1.5 miles long and devoid of trees and most vegetation.  There are some beautiful wild roses that grow on it, and many sea birds hunt the water's edge.  This is the only beach we swam at because of its proximity, beauty; and did I mention the perfect waves?

Wednesday night Sarah and I went on a date for dinner and a sit in Stonington, CT a few miles away.  Remind me to tell you about dinner later.  This is a beach blog, so I'm really trying to stay focused.  We sat together holding hands in our beach chairs and watched the sail boats, schooners, and yachts move in and out of the harbor past the setting sun.  If that seems too much to handle, let me add some comic relief in the way of a gaggle of scuba divers.  When we arrived at the beach, it was already what could respectably be called evening, and yet, there were about four or five men doing battle with their scuba gear on the beach and seeming to be winning.  Sure enough, within a few minutes after we got comfortable, they had managed to subdue most of their gear and get out into the water relatively further than the children were splashing.  Although we felt a legitimate concern that this ragtag crew would somehow precipitate a rescue mission, our more immediate concern became the one "diver" (really just an overly dressed wader still at this point) who continued to fiddle with his equipment.  If it had been anything else, bemusement would have been our only feeling, but as the item in question was a harpoon gun, our interest in self preservation was complicating our emotional responses.  I have never in my life seen such a horrifying ambivalence toward muzzle control. And I hope to live a long and healthy life without a repeat.  As he waved the harpoon gun carelessly back and forth, I felt mixtures of personal dread, fear for my beloved, and concern about the inadequacies of my most recent CPR/first-aid training depending on whether it was my chest, Sarah's limbs, or the playfully naive children's heads that were down range, respectively.  Finally, he managed to do something that made him give up his folly and submerge.  We did not stay long enough to see whether all in his party returned unperforated.

I did quite a bit of pleasure reading this week.  After months of forced reading on subjects as interesting as school finance, management theory, and comparisons of various teacher evaluation rubrics, I let loose with an indiscriminate carnival of subject matter.  Primarily, I was reading Chuck D's journal from his days on the HMS Beagle, as seen here.  He was a great human being whose character continues to grow in my mind.   On this page he is chastising the senseless and indiscriminate slaughter of the "savages of South America" by the "Christian armies of Europe".  That was in 1831!  AND it was in between identifying new species of rhea, comparing various adaptations of finches on islands, fossil hunting, considering maritime habits and conditions, and both supporting Lyell's new theories about the ages of the earth with his findings and using that theory to build what would be one of the greatest scientific revelations in history!  He also thought slavery was barbarous.  Darwin was one bad brother.  Anyway, besides that, we did some collective Melville reading; he turned 195 this year... or at least his bones did.  And, I finally looked into the free kindle editions that Dad has been telling me about, so as anyone who knows me can probably guess, that was exciting.  Coincidentally, this is the first month that I've gotten a warning that I've used 75% of my data plan... I'm sure they're unrelated.  I downloaded a collection of pirate journals printed in the early 1900s, a couple John Muir books, some essays by Bertrand Russell I haven't read yet, a journal of a whaler, a wildreness survival book published in the late 1800s, and a book titled, The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910-1913.  I read bits and pieces of all of these.  They are all getting enjoyably confused in my head along with the audible edition of MASH that we downloaded for the car ride.

Oh.  I also looked at the Sibley's Guide to Birds of North America a lot and tried desperately to see the differences between the sea gulls that all these birders claim to see.  So far, with Sarah's help, we have identified grey gulls, brown gulls, gulls that are a little bit grey, a tiny bit black, and mostly white (see image above), and gulls that raid beach bags.  Sibley, incidentally does not recognize any of these species.

This is a picture of Bob foolishly trying to feed the gulls from his hand.  He was carried away right after this picture was taken.  Fortunately he sailed safely back to earth, using his hat as a sail, after being dropped by the flock.

Back just in time for some surfing lessons!  Zhora talked about surfing for at least the week leading up to our trip, so it was really cool to see her get to ride around on the boogie board a little bit.  Sarah and Bob both took turns too, though they both chose to go a little deeper and lay on the board.

On our last full day in Rhode Island I ran (haltingly) down the bay side of Napatree Point and back up the ocean side.  I stopped many times to study the birds, flip over shells, and look at the slaughter of crustaceans and fish that the oystercatchers, gulls, terns, plovers, pipers, eiders, and ospreys had wrought.  Above is a shot through my binoculars of a pair of ruddy turnstones!  They are beautiful and remind me of quail in a way.  This was a first sighting for me.

Here are many American oystercatchers earning their name.

This guy (deceased) is just a little larger than my thumb!

I made this one extra large, but you may need to click on it and blow it up even more to see the shell that the gull is carrying here.  I am super excited that I got to see this guy pry a shelled animal out of the surf, carry it high into the air and expertly drop it on some rocks to break it open!  I did a quick look around to see if David Attenborough would be there to tell me about this amazing behavior.  What was really cool was that he had to really think about what he was doing.  He had to get high enough to break the shell, but stay low enough that he could get to his dinner before it got snatched out from under him!

This is the beach at the end of the point.  The roses smelled lovely and were absolutely gorgeous when taken in from a distance.  Unfortunately, I missed an opportunity to snap a picture of their greatest mass blooming... we spent that day in the water... oh well, such are the sacrifices of beach vacations.

Wish I could have gotten a glimpse of this deer.  Might be the smartest or luckiest of its species!

I've posted it before on this site, but it bears repeating when looking at all these forms:

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."  This, from Darwin's later and better known work. 

So, that's the end of the first vacation blog post.  The beach was fantastic and, in light of all the privately held lands, private club beaches, and the like, we felt very fortunate to find such a lovely and unspoiled spit of land.  As usual, we wished for more time at the beach and enjoyed every minute we got, unapologetically.  Through the coming week I'll post a few short videos we shot, do a Mystic Seaport blog, and put up a post about some of the other activities we got into.  You won't want to miss the pictures of Sarah with her first lobster dinner!  Already dreaming about Ocracoke Coffee Company and mile marker 59 on 12 South!