Last Adventure of the Summer: Beach Day

Well, we were planning to do a couple of big end-of-summer adventures last week, checking out Aztec Falls and possibly doing an overnighter to see if we could find some other places I had heard about up in that same general area, but when Courtland had his accident with his teeth we decided it might not be the best idea to go on a two-day hiking expedition the following morning.  So we relaxed a bit instead, and yesterday we went for our last little adventure of the summer.

My mom, my brother Matthew, the boys, and I went down to La Jolla Cove.  We spent most of our time at the little beach immediately south of the cove, which is a nice tiny little beach with some rocks to do a little climbing -- we've been to that one three different times, and all three times the beach has been drastically different at different tide levels.  We walked down the rocky shore a ways, the boys found some little "caves" in the rocks, dug for sand crabs, jumped off rocks into the sand, and played in the waves.  Then we walked north of there, and got to the cove.  The sea wall was built years ago to create a protected Children's Cove beach, but the sea lions took it over and now people always come there to see the sea lions.  I can't remember ever coming to La Jolla Cove before when it wasn't full of sea lions, but this time there were children swimming and we didn't see any sea lions in the cove itself -- we just saw them swimming out in the water, and sitting up on the rocks out in the water to the north and south of the cove.  We went down to the cove and through the little tunnel in the rock on the right-hand side, where Matthew found a rock to jump from into the water.  He gave the boys some instruction on how to improve their cliff jumping stance, and the three youngest boys each took a few turns jumping in with him.  (The older two boys had opted to stay back at the south beach and continue collecting sand crabs).  Then, after some time, Matthew talked me into jumping too.  Of course, standing up on the top of that rock looking down into the waves made it feel like I was 20 or 30 feet above the water, but after I eventually made myself jump and looked back up, it was something like 12 feet high or so.  :)  But this is good for me -- I've gradually been working on getting over (or sometimes ignoring) my fear of heights that I've had since I was a little kid.  Then we headed back to the south beach to find all 5 boys swimming out through a shallow area surrounded by rocks, with a really pretty turquoise pool.  I love beaches like this -- with sand and waves, but also with rocks and cliffs and places to climb and explore.  All in all, I'd say it was a fantastic way to spend the day.

Seals on the rocks

Isaac 

Matthew

Courtland

Camden: "Cannon Ball!"

I did it!

Yes, Camden (bottom right) is airborne in this photo -- he was jumping into the pool.

Sand crabs -- I had to insist that it was impossible for them to "create" salt water at home and keep these guys alive for very long, so they had to stay at the beach.