Dragon Kite at Ocean Shores

This is one of my favorite photos from our day at Ocean Shores. We've been wanting to go do something before the kids go back to school, and since Doug was officially no longer on call for jury duty, we decided to make the drive out to the coast. Usually when we go to the beach it's on Puget Sound, which is much more sheltered. This is the real ocean.

It's about a two-hour drive. We've had a very rainy week and we were expecting some cloud cover, but when we got out there it was sunny. Surprise! I was the only one who got sunburned.



We brought along our kites. Doug picked up a big dragon kite just a couple of weeks ago, and we hadn't been able to really fly it yet.  (We took it out to the Chambers Creek Properties on Monday, but weren't able to get it to stay up for more than thirty seconds or so.)



We got the little ladybug kite up in the air first. That one's easy.



Going up...



Success! It's a heavy kite and takes a good steady wind. (We've never tried to fly anything bigger than this--we saw some really cool kites out there!)



Kate has named the dragon Breeze Cutter.



Kite high in the sky, with the string payed all the way out.



Ocean Shores is one of the few places where you can drive on the beach. People do get stuck.



We spotted this behemoth kite wallowing through the sky in the distance and decided to walk down the beach and check it out.



Walking down the beach involved walking next to the water. And then in the water. We put the kite in the car and got the kids' water shoes.



Each wave was topped with a line of this brown foamy scum. It was really kind of gross. I don't know if it's always like that or if we were just there on a particularly scummy day. I told Kate I was proud of her for getting in it at all. Her disgust threshold is normally pretty low. (She was jumping in and out of the water, hollering, "It's so gross! It's so gross!")



Andy seemed to really enjoy the sensation of the waves moving past, and the sand shifting under his feet.



In spite of brown scum, Kate had a great time. At one point she ran over and hugged me and said, "Thanks for bringing us here!"



Windy!



We finally made it down to where the big kite was. It was anchored to the bumper of an RV. The thing was enormous. It looked longer than the RV. (It's advertising premierkites.com)



Shirts!



Both kids ended up looking like this. We did bring dry clothes, just in case! Pants were needed.



We made it back over to where we were parked, and then the kids and I took a detour through the dunes to the public restrooms while Doug brought the car around. Kate thought the dunes were very cool.



It turns out a shutter speed of 125 is not fast enough to capture active kids!

There was no foot-washing station, that we could see, but we managed to get everyone de-scummed and de-sanded by filling up a water bottle repeatedly in the bathroom and pouring it over people's feet. Beach logistics can be complicated.

We made it back to Tacoma at about 6:00, and went to El Sabor for dinner. Yum!