COAST TO VALLEY

Friday we escaped the triple digits of the valley and go ourselves a spot on Muir Beach. Astonishingly running into our friends from home who were also escaping the heat. Neither of us are big beach-dayers but I guess we had the same idea.

It was so delightful freezing our butts off jumping in the waves and watching kiddo squeal with delight at each wave. We alternating playing in the freezing water with sitting on the fiery hot sand to warm up!

Today we made it back out to our William Pond Sit Spot Sunday. We saw the merganser family again! Highlight! The babies were already so much bigger than when we last saw them three weeks ago. They and their parent were so fast! Skimming across the water and ducking under for food. The babies still had the white stripey coloring.

We collected more Saint John's Wort, did some splashing in the shallow water and got back to the car before it got too hot! We saw a couple acorn woodpeckers fly over the river and go to the favorite snag. We saw a couple western bluebirds in the manicured part of the park by the parking lot. We usually see magpies there and had seen them nesting above where we usually park in earlier months, but haven't seen them today.

This also makes me realize we've missed the last two Sundays at our sit spot. But we did make it to our sit spot for an evening dinner last week. Sunday had been Fourth of July and we did a day hike to Dardanelle Lake in the Sierra instead! The week before that we had the sniffles and stayed home.

Other than a few misses like these and our trip to Oregon for a couple weeks, kiddo and I have been at this spot every week since January. It's been wonderful watching the season's turn and the animal activity change over this past half-year. Pre-January we also went here quite often, probably close to weekly! I've just been documenting it and making it more of a ritual since January!