Vacation: Part 5: Clam Beach: 02/23/07
Over this 3-day weekend we took our first vacation as a family of four. I've been posting photo montages of each place we stopped on my livejournal site but I plan to post a more in depth description of what we did here, one stop per day.
After our breakfast in Arcata we headed north again for a few miles, stopping for an early morning walk along Clam Beach. Since going to school at UCSB, this was my first morning beach walk and I loved every minute of it.
Clam Beach has one of the longest and flattest beaches I've seen in California and it reminded me of Daytona Beach if it had been plucked from Florida and dropped into northern California so that the palm trees were replaced with pine trees and the hotels were replaced by mountains.
As the rain was blowing eastward, we were faced with a cold wind. I wrapped Harriet's bald head up in my black cardigan sweater and she did her best to hide in the folds of the sling. Later as the wind abated briefly, she got interested in the beach and decided to take a look around, especially to watch Sean and Ian racing around on the sand.
As Clam Beach is so flat the thick sand seems to attract and hold "treasure" better than the rocker beaches that I'm used to. Clam Beach also allows dogs, cars and horses so there were many interesting tracks in the sand. I found an old and well chewed tennis ball and the remains of a sand dollar. I took photographs of both things against the sand as they were so pretty in their own special ways. Sean and I also wrote the word "sand" in the sand which I photographed.
We only stayed long enough to walk from our car to the edge of the water and back as it was so cold and windy. Had the weather been nicer or it been later in the day when the sun was higher we would probably have stayed longer. It really is one of the most beautiful beaches I've been to.
arcata | clam beach | breakfast | vacation | beach | daytona
