I love that website, by the way.

Today was the perfect Sunday. A late start, a bit of brekkie, beach time with lots of swimming, a beverage or two...maybe some ice cream. Perhaps.

We headed out to the beach at around noon. Kurt was showing us (us being myself and our friend Amy, of last night's date) a "secret" beach that he had only just discovered via another friend who has only been on the Rock for 6 months and yet seems to know about absolutely everything cool that we have never heard of. Like this beach. It is gorgeous. Secluded. Deserted. Clean. And not ghetto, like the other beach we tend to spend time at, mostly because it's the island default. It's also the beach that all of the cruise ships send their passengers to en masse, meaning that it is a sea of pasty-skinned tourists, yelling at their sulky teenagers and letting it all hang out. Literally. It's not gorgeous.

So, I guess my point is that the beach we went to today was a diamond in the rough. It WAS gorgeous and we are so going back, like every Sunday.

I did the obligatory application of SPF prior to getting on the bike this morning, thinking that I'd had so much sun already this year that if I missed a little spot here or there, or didn't re-apply directly after coming out of the water, I'd probably still do OK. My skin tends to get pretty dark and once it's past a certain point, I know I'm not going to burn anymore. I still like to cover up, but I don't fret about it too much because honestly, we don't get to the beach as often as we'd like to, and I don't spend hours and hours baking in the sun. Anyways, we got to the beach, I took a quick dip in the beautiful blue waves, stretched out on the towel and fell asleep.

Mistake #1.

I woke up feeling pretty hot and bothered, so I got back into the water to cool down. I spent about half an hour bobbing around in the waves, dodging fish and trying to keep my bathing suit bottoms on, before getting back out and spending another hour or so reading on the towel.

Mistake #2.

Both mistakes being, of course, the absence of even a half-assed attempt at re-applying sunscreen.

Now, shortly before bedtime, I am facing the distinct prospect of waking up tomorrow looking like someone who had a terrible facial done by someone who hated me. Burned. Nose, cheeks, forehead. Awesome. Oh, and the backs of my legs, my lower back, my stomach and my chest. FML. I know it's no one's fault but my own and can't for the life of me imagine what would make me so irresponsible as to believe that my skin is invincible to harmful UV rays.

The worst part? I commute to work every day with my dermatologist, a women who takes such care to avoid any iota of a UV ray that she has the complexion of a corpse. She is a lovely person, and (as you can imagine) a fantastic dermatologist, but I know there will be disapproval in her eyes tomorrow morning when she surveys the UV damage I have sustained this weekend. Awkward.

Right behind our house, there is a tiny beach. No more than 20 feet long and not very deep, it's just wide enough for a few towels and a picnic. Unfortunately, we've never used it because I've always assumed that it was dirty, because every time we walked by it I could see broken glass everywhere, along the sand and in the water.

Yesterday afternoon, Kurt and I decided to take advantage of some amazing weather (it was probably at least 23 degrees) and go for a walk. There were boats everywhere, full of people out enjoying the day. It was pretty much the perfect afternoon. We walked up to this old cemetary we've been running and driving past for the past 5 months without exploring and finally walked through it. I have a small obsession with old cemetaries and this one fit the bill - graves dating back to the 1700s. I think the oldest person in the whole cemetary died at 53. Most were sailors between 21 and 35, many died of yellow fever or had drowned. We spent a long time there, walking through the paths and reading the stones. I'm glad we finally stopped...I've never seen anyone walking through it before and I think it deserves a visit every now and then.

On the way home, we decided to skip the road and walk along the rocks at the water's edge. They're all volcanic, with some very flat spots like someone had scraped off the ragged parts, and some jagged towers that we had to pick our way around carefully. Every now and then, we'd jump over a crevass with waves splashing up into it or have to find our way around big tidepools. We were just about to scramble back up to the road when I saw a little rocky patch that looked like it was covered in glass, like our backyard beach. I jumped down into it to get a better look and realized that the glass wasn't tossed from the road, like I had assumed, but had washed up in the waves. Smooth, tumbled chunks of glass in all different colors were scattered through the rocks, along with chunks of painted ceramics and china and all sorts of other "treasures" from the depths. I was in heaven. Kurt looked patient, but I think he probably could have skipped the whole thing and been happy. It was the same look he had on when we watched The Little Mermaid.

When I was a kid, my Dad used to pile Kelsey and I into his boat and take us to beaches on the little islands off Oak Bay. They don't need to be named...I'm afraid that they're already too popular, but back then they weren't visited very often and the beaches were totally untouched. There was no litter anywhere, no bottle caps or chunks of plastic or beer cans. They were pristine and without another soul around, they were our own private playground. My Dad, being the ultimate beach scavenger for neat old things, taught us where to look for the good stuff and we'd spend entire afternoons digging through the rocks and finding chunks of pottery and bits of brightly painted china, all of which had been tumbled smooth by the ocean and somehow found its way to the shore. I have no idea why old dishes end up in the ocean, but apparently they do. Lots of them. We used to take home bags of bits and pieces, rinse them off in fresh water and then try to piece them together, like we actually thought we could reassemble an old bowl or plate. Needless to say, we never got very far, but we loved looking at them anyways and imagining where they had come from.

I guess that beach scavenger still lives inside of me because I was crouched down on those rocks for ages yesterday. I found pieces of painted china, a rusty old fish hook, a railway spike, a few pieces of different colored glass and a couple of pieces of coral. Thanks to Kurt's pockets, they all made it back to the apartment, where they're currently scattered on a table awaiting some kind of artsy project...or maybe a return to the sea.

A bit of Googling today revealed that the island is actually known for beach glass. It's a destination for beach glass collectors because it's full of pockets, like the one we found yesterday, where foreign objects have a tendency to wash up by the thousands. I got the heads up on a few other beaches that are known for their treasures, and I think we'll make our way out there next weekend with Clay in tow. At least then Kurt will have someone to comiserate with and that will buy me more time to find treasures.

By the time we got home from our walk, we'd been gone for 3 hours and had probably walked about 7km in total, but it was just too nice of an afternoon to do anything else. I got a bit of a sunburn on my nose, but my table full of finds made it worth it.