July 30th, 2020

The other afternoon I decided to stop doing anything useful and productive and instead take a walk to the beach.  It was a pretty moment in a pretty day with no rain, reasonable summer temperatures and honestly nothing pressing on my gotta-do list.  So before I changed my mind, I grabbed my camera and headed out the door. 

We live only a few blocks from the beach.  According to my step counter, it is precisely .8 miles from my front door to the sand at Chauncy Howard Beach access point.   If I were a bird and could fly it would even less because it would be a straight line.  

It's a pleasant walk through a nice residential area and if you didn't know there was a beach a few blocks away, you might be surprised when suddenly, there it is.  The houses are all different ages, sizes, colours and shapes but all of them are nicely taken care of with mostly green lawns, (some people have gravel yards ??) trees, hedges and flowers.  

I've taken this walk a zillion or so times but not recently.  (For which I have no excuse other than rainy afternoons and lazy bones)  So while most of what I saw was familiar, some of it was new to me.

There were more For Rent, For Sale and other signs than I recall.  And one brand new house being built.  What?  When did that happen?   Concrete blocks construction is pretty quick but wow!  I didn't think it had been quite long enough to put up a house since I took this particular walk! 

There were of course trees and shrubs and lawns galore.  But it's the flowers that do it for me.  They are everywhere, they are gorgeous and I adore them all!

And it's not just flowers that caught my eye, sometimes it's unusual or unexpected greenry of other sorts:

I didn't bother to take photos of the trees. There are so dang many of them.  Before we moved here I assumed it would be all palm trees. I was so very wrong.  It's not just the sheer number of trees it's the incredible variety of them!

But I did take some photos of yard art.  I'm always rather taken by yard art.  It doesn't matter what kind it is, it always catches my eye.  I've experimented over the years with a few things and the only thing that remotely fit the category of yard art that I ever had which felt comfortable to me was a few wind chimes (that ultimately got destroyed by Colorado storms) and a beautiful gazing ball that middle son and his wife gifted me.  The gazing ball lived in my Colorado gardens and was the jewel in the crown right up until there was a unpredicted and violent hail storm while Tim and I were at work one day. I came home to find my gazing ball in an unbearable number of pieces.  It was heartbreaking.   

Since then I've made a few dollar store attempts. But none of them felt exactly right and of course none of them lasted more than a season either (hey, dollar store, right?).  So instead I will admire other people's choices:

There were loads of flags.  I didn't even bother to snap photos of even a fraction of them.  But here is a very tiny sampling:

I actually saw loads of birds and squirrels and lizards and so forth but only took pictures of a few:

There was a canal and a pond that I passed by too:

And of course eventually I got to the beach.  Sun, sand and boats.  Umbrellas and benches and markers for seas turtle nests.  Oh yeah, and the ocean. Almost forgot that part.  Ocean.:

So there you have it.  In a walk less than a mile long, I saw all that and more.  I clearly need to do this more often!