Flying a Kite and Exploring Tide Pools

Last week we decided to squeeze in another trip to the coast before school started.  The beach is one of my favorite places to be, and we had a wonderful few days of playing in the ocean and exploring the coast, a perfect way to end our summer break.

We always get to the beach and get our things settled and spend our first evening playing in the sand and the waves while the sun goes down, the sunsets were beautiful.

The moon was also putting on a rather impressive show over the weekend as it approached a full moon on Friday, the second full moon in August, which by some definitions made it a rare "blue moon".  On the drive home we saw the moon so big and round and orange it was definitely looking like an autumn moon, sadly our auto focus cameras did it no justice, but it was beautiful.

We spent a lot of time splashing around in the waves, the water was warm, and really nice.

Every year when we visit the coast in August we see large flocks of pelicans, they were flying back and forth fishing, they are such large and impressive birds!

One of the days we were at the beach the wind was blowing sand everywhere, so we set up a nice spot to relax among the grassy hills that kept the sand from blowing into our eyes.

Sarah took the opportunity to make a fairy house in the grass.

She wove grass blades to make the walls, made beds of woven grass and feathers.

Decorated with found sticks and a couple beach flowers.

And Gary whittled a little fairy table out of a stick.   We are sure the fairies on a beach vacation will enjoy it. ;)  We are inspired by this series  Fairy Houses . . . Everywhere! (The Fairy Houses Series) , and enjoy finding spots to build little fairy houses.

One thing that was on my list of things to do was to fly a kite, we had never flown a kite on the beach before, and always see them flying.  We found a small classic looking kite in the local toy shop and thought we would give it a try.

I had no idea how easy it was to fly a kite on the beach, it went right up.

We all had fun watching it dance around, and seeing how high we could get it to go.

I have definitely found a new tradition, I enjoyed kite flying quite a bit.

I think our classic little kite looked so pretty up in the bright blue sky.  I look forward to trying other kite shapes on our future beach trips.

We also made our way to Haystack Rock on Cannon Beach, during low tide you can explore the tide pools all around it.

We spent quite some time looking in all of the different tide pools.

There were lots of very colorful starfish and sea anemones.

I loved this color of green, it looked like a miniature landscape of beautiful lush islands.

Sarah and Joe had a great time exploring.

I loved the purple and orange star fish.

and these bright green sea anemones.

There were lots of individual rocks in their own pool of water, we had fun looking for hermit crabs and little fish.

Cannon Beach was such a nice place to explore, we brought binoculars and were able to see various birds living way up on top of the rocks as well, definitely a great place to visit.

I look forward to our next beach visit, it was a very rejuvenating trip, and the perfect way to relax before gearing up for the busy school year.

Hope everyone is having a nice Labor Day weekend!