Let's Go to the Beach, Beach...

Turquoise 

Just so you know readers, I have been saving this color for several months. The reason is spring break...


Spring break was last week; most of you knew that already.  For spring break my family decided to go to the Bahamas!!

I have been stoked about this trip for a long time. I think I bored many of my friends to death by telling them for the sixteenth time that I was going to the Bahamas for spring break and that I was really excited.

We rented this cute little cottage in this little community on the beach.

This is a picture of the back of our house
Photo Courtesy of VRBO

The beach was a short walk down a path out of the back of the house.  The beach is kind of hard to explain, but colors is a great place to start...

I mean I had heard about how white the sand was and how blue the water was, and seen lots of pictures. I can tell you, seeing it in person and in a picture are two completely different things.  I was struck a little speechless (and sightless on account of the sun) when I first saw it!

Right into the water with me!

I know, reader, I keep saying it, but the water is an incredible turquoise color, it almost looks like someone dyed it. The sand is unlike any other sand I have ever seen/felt in my life. It is super, super soft, and warm. Did I mention it is also a brilliant, blinding, creamy, white color?  I was in heaven!  

Me and my brother on the beach
Photo Creds to Me

For my birthday,  we went on a guided kayak/snorkeling tour. This guy took us kayaking to this cute little island called Peterson Cay (pronounced "key").  It's actually the smallest national park in the Bahamas.  We dropped our paddles once we got there and put on some snorkeling gear he brought for us. We snorkeled for the rest of the morning. When we went back to the island he made us lunch! Then we had some free time and kayaked back to the mainland. It was pretty fun to be out in the middle of that turquoise water.

I would have more pictures to increase the jealousy factor but I blew it. I bought this waterproof phone case especially for this trip and it was working great until we got back from snorkeling and I opened it up to find that the inside was soaked. The camera on my phone is completely broken now... Whoops.

I really was immersed in turquoise for the rest of the trip... pretty much just beach days! It was really great.

Me and my brother on the beach in front of our house

 Photo Creds to my Dad

On my actual birthday we dressed in something other than a bathing suit and went to this garden down the road from our house. It was called the Garden of the Groves and it was really pretty, with several trees and plants that don't grow anywhere else. 

Garden of the Groves

After that we went home and the man that took care of our house, who is also a chef, cooked me a special birthday dinner!! It was so yummy!! Thanks Andrew!!!

Eating my birthday dessert!

Creds to my Mom

You are probably by now getting a little sick of hearing about my turquoise adventure, but I have just one more thing....

On our last day we went to Paradise cove, yes, another beach.  It was also, gorgeous, but the best part? There was a reef called Dead Man's Reef that you swim out to and snorkel! This wasn't just some seaweed and a couple of corals, it was like a full on reef! It was like Finding Nemo or something.  It was super cool! There were all sorts of fish in different colors shapes and sizes!

See a similarity?? Creds me

Creds here

I'll just share a couple of highlights. First of all were these turquoise parrot fish that we found that I thought would be perfect for my turquoise blog.

Some turquoise fish.
 Creds to Me

Then there were these freaky barracudas (that fish that killed Nemo's mom) that decided to band together to scare Sabine. Actually they didn't really do anything but there were like twenty of them just sitting there looking at us with their creepy little bug eyes. Ugh, they give me the shivers.

This is the one from Finding Nemo, I didn't get a picture of the ones we saw

Creds

Then whenever you swam in and out of the reef there was this one place on the way back to shore that like six or seven sea turtles liked to hang out. It was really cool to keep seeing them! There was even one that had these fish that were cleaning its shell attached to its back!

Here is one turtle

And another one 

Creds to me

The last thing that we saw was this manta ray! It was kind of far away so there isn't a really good picture but it was huge! That was pretty cool.

You can barely see it

Creds to me

It was really fun to be able to spend spring break and my birthday in such a cool place! I suspect you can figure out why turquoise truly is my favorite!

Winter, Water, and Whales

Maybe I should have included this part of my trip in my last post because there was an awful lot of sand. I didn't, so here it is...


GREY

After our adventures in Death Valley my family and I drove up the coast into Oregon.  We rented a beach house in a place called Brookings. It was beautiful because the house was on the corner of a river and the ocean.

The front porch of our house

Since it is winter, most of the time we were there the landscape was quite grey and cold. When we walked down to the beach, the water was grey. When you looked at the sky, it was grey.

One day we were on a beach that was a short drive from our house. As I was looking out at the ocean I saw a large spray of water far off in the distance. For a second I thought I was going crazy, but then I saw another one. When another one came up I pointed it out to my family. Soon we realized that these were whale spouts.

This was totally worth the cold and windy walk.  We were soon off, looking for a better place to see the spouts more clearly. When we reached a parking lot on top of a cliff we stopped, only to find that it was already occupied with several people armed with binoculars and very heavy duty cameras. They told us that the whales that we were seeing were grey whales.

Watching Whales at Harris Beach State Park

We sat up there with them for hours. Whenever a whale came up everyone would cheer a little. I wish I could have taken a picture of them, but they were too far away for our camera.  However, I can describe what I saw through binoculars, because it was really incredible.

As well as a spout, the whale crests the water, so you see his back skimming the water.  If you are lucky, he jumps a little and then a tail comes flipping out of the water to splash down. This scene played out once or twice every fifteen minutes and the rest of the time we stared at the horizon, looking for more.

Breaching Whale
Photo Courtesy of Rogue River

The next day we decided to try another place that was even higher up. To get to this one you had to hike out a bit.  The whales were there again!

I received a pamphlet from one of the ladies at the first place telling me about migration patterns of whales and such.

I found that the whales can be seen on the coast of Oregon almost all year round.  They feed in Oregon and Alaska in the summer and fall. In early December the entire grey whale population goes south to Mexico and southern California.  Migration reaches its peak around the first week in January (that is when we were there).  Then around late February they start heading back up to Oregon and Alaska again.

Around another corner there seemed to be another surprise. As we were walking we heard a noise, it sounded like a strange mix of someone laughing and a dog barking.

The famous Harris Beach sea lions
Photo Courtesy of Harris Beach State Park

We looked out towards the water and couldn't see anything except for some rocks. We took out our binoculars and looked again. There was one rock that had a couple dozen things on it that looked suspiciously like logs, except they were moving. I realized that we had found the beach's famous sea lions! We walked over a hill and the sea lions were so loud that I could still hear them all of the way back to the car!

It was so cool to walk up and down the beach watching the grey whales, in the grey water, under a grey sky.

Beach at Harris State Park

Sands and Sunrises

 Sand, yes that is a color


Please bear with me while I explain what I have been up to.


On Christmas Day I flew with my family to Las Vegas and we drove to Death Valley

When we left Las Vegas we had to drive for 2 hours through a desert with no sign of civilization except for some correctional facility in the Middle of Nowhere, Nevada.

Have you ever been to

Photo courtesy of MB Post

If you have then you know that it's in the middle of nothing, nowhere, surrounded by even less, but it is the color of sand... everywhere...

My footprints.. Death Valley National Park, 12/26/14

even at night...

 Mosaic Canyon., at night, 12/25/14

This post is about sand because from the moment we left the city of Las Vegas to about three hours after we left Death Valley that is all there was to see.

But it's really not that bad.  It turns out sand can be fun.  We spent a lot of time walking  in it, up it, rolling down it, and enjoying the sun rise over it.

I know it sounds kind of desolate and lonely out there but it can be gorgeous, fun, and was a really cool place to visit.

I expected the entire place to be covered in sand, it is the desert after all, however I was surprised to learn that it had more rocks and plants than sand!

We wanted to see at least some sand dunes. We decided the best time to see the dunes would be at sunrise (I don't think I agreed to this).  We trudged out of bed at 6:00 AM, in the unseasonalably and unreasonably cold morning.  Despite the early wakeup, I would recommend this to anyone.  It was incredible!

Worth it right????

I wanted to know why there weren't a lot of sand dunes. I did some research and it turns out less than one percent of the desert in Death Valley is covered in sand dunes.  There has to be a certain environment for sand dunes to form.  The recipe is sand, wind, and a place for the sand to collect.  The Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes are the most popular dunes in the park and its easy to see why.  Some of the dunes rise to about 100 feet, and they run across a wide area and seem like they go on forever, with mountains on all sides.
It turns out that there are three types of dunes in the Mesquite Dunes area, (who knew more than one existed?) which is apparently and ancient lakebed.
Crescent dunes are wide and form under winds that blow from one direction.  They also move more quickly over the desert than any other dune.  We saw many crescents, but sadly, did not actually photograph one.  They were great for sledding and rolling down.

Linear dunes are the next variety. They are straight and long sand ridges that run forever in a line.  It forms as the result of wind coming from more than one direction and can extend for miles, and  were really hard to walk on without starting mini avalanches along the way.

Crossing linear dune in Death Valley

There are also star dunes. They are sand dunes with a steep side in three or more directions off of a center point.  They grow up instead of out to the sides, and tend to be tall and on the edges of the dunes.

Since I didn't know at the time that there were more than one kind of dune I didn't know what I was looking at until afterwards, so sadly I don't know what types I saw.



When we left Death Valley, I thought my sand-colored adventures were over.  I was wrong.  A few days later, my dad and I were at a music store in Fort Bragg, California.

                           He picked up a balalaika, which is a Russian instrument. We ended up buying it and a music book to go with it. Needless to say I am obsessed and it is more my instrument now than his. (I fully intend to have learned it by the time I get home.)

My new obsession
photo courtesy of Accent Music

Happy New Year and here's to sand-colored vacations!