July 29th, 2024

There are so many wonderful things about living by the water.  Many of them I anticipated, at  least on some level, but other things were unexpected.  For example, this being our rainy season, it should not surprise anyone to learn that we usually experience at least a little bit of rain every single day.  Some days it's a LOT of rain.  And this year it's been a Lottalot of rain!

And that's all good stuff.  The green growing outside things are happyhappy which in turn makes the wildlife happy. And all of that makes the people happy.  The only thing not awesome about it really has a negative hiking impact as in it either causes us to cancel the hike entirely because we are literally rained out, or the hiking day itself is perfectly lovely but the trails are less than ideal.  Dang.

And that was our dilemma on this past Friday.  Every single day of that week we had experienced absolute deluges of water which left our usual preserves buggy, mucky and flooded.  The trifecta of crappy hiking.  So instead of hitting any of our usual trails we went to Caspersen Beach to walk the path there.  Bonus to living by the beach!

Now this isn't a stroll on the beach at the water's edge that I'm talking about here, although, there is a beach and we can (and did) access it now and again.  Nope, it's an actual hiking trail that is about two miles long (which means 4 miles total to the end and back).  And while you cannot see it most of the time, the beach is on one side of the trail and the intercoastal is on the other.  (you have to wander down other little paths to reach either most  of the time) No matter how much it rains, the sand only gets so wet. No muck, limited bugs and as long as we didn't decide to go for a swim, we didn't get wet.  Not bad!

We haven't done this trail in over a year at least, so it was nice to be back.  Obviously, this is a Photo Safari Report and also obviously I'm calling it the Caspersen Beach Hike.

I think we saw more tortoises than we ever have before, maybe a lifetime total.  Once they woke up (all of the tortoise alarms must be set for the same times because we saw none at all for quite some time and then suddenly we saw ALL of them!)  And while I'm sure they all look the same to you (frankly to me too) I'm sure they know the difference. 

Here are some of them:
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Definitely saw more birds than expected too.  Well wait a minute. I expected to see the sorts of birds that hang out at the beach  (and we did) but the other birds were a lovely surprise. Especially the number of Cardinals!:

Not too many flowers seem to grow that close to the beach, but there were a few successful botannical shots:
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Then, for the butterfly and dragonfly category, there are a few contenders :

Pretty trails and general scenery photos abounded. I will try to keep it to a minimum:
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And then there are the randos which, this time, are all of the same thing, the "shell tree" that we found on the beach.  Someone found a bit of driftwood that had a lot of branches and then took the time and effort to wander the beach seeking out shells that had holes in them and decorated with them.  It Was Awesome!

I sincerely wish I had ever been creative enough to think of doing such a thing!  Maybe another day, another walk. Who knows?

Anyway, that's it for the Caspersen Beach Hike. Hope you enjoy it.  For now, here's Sam and Joy, signing off on this Photo Safari Report.