Sea Glass Hunting

The summer is over but Anouk and I have still made a point to hit the beach at least once a week in September and October. I love the beach in autumn; beaches change with the seasons, too, and fall is especially pretty with the pines dropping needles and the goldenrod in the dunegrass coming into bloom. When we come home we're chilly and cozy and reinvigorated -- and we usually have a handful of sea glass to show off for our efforts.

Autumn is a great time of year for sea-glass hunting -- the weather is cooling down, the beaches are beginning to empty, and storms are churning up the coast, stirring everything up. Prime sea glass hunting weather. Some people chart the tides and the phases of the moon to find the best times for collecting sea glass, others bring special equipment to pan for glass in the shallows. Anne and I just walk and see what we see, which is usually a good enough tactic.

There is an art to looking for sea glass and A. has it. She can spot even the tiniest shards of color in the tide line. Of course, because sea glass is really just glass, it can be sharp, so she knows not to touch it until I've examined it and pronounced it OK. She just calls out the color and I come over to check out what she's found. If it's smooth enough and frosted enough, the glass goes into our bucket. If it's still sharp and only a little cloudy, we toss it back into the water. The waves will smooth it a little more and it will wash up for somebody else, sometime later. That's the Tao of sea glass hunting -- if it's not for you, it's not for you. Move on.



The beaches around Hampton Roads are great for sea glass, because of their proximity to shipping lanes, factories, and colonial-era settlements. So there is always another lovely frosted glass shard or smooth piece of pottery to find and bring home and display. There's a hierarchy of sea glass -- oranges, reds, yellows, and purples are rare. Black is almost impossible to find. The common blues and greens and browns are a dime a dozen -- a lot of "professional" sea glass collectors wouldn't even bother picking it up, but we like it.



I don't know exactly why I love sea glass so much but I think it has something to do with the idea of something ugly -- something that's basically just trash, junk -- that's transformed and smoothed into something beautiful. I read once that diamonds are made by nature and refined by man; sea glass is made by man and refined by nature. I think that's a really humbling thought.

Do you collect for sea glass? For those of you readers who live in landlocked places, don't forget about beach glass (found along rivers and lakes). For an interesting NYT article about the current state of sea glass collecting in the US, click here.

Have a great weekend!

Ocean View Station Museum

Sometimes, when Anouk and I visit the Pretlow Library in Norfolk, we stop in and visit the Ocean View Station Museum on the ground floor before we leave, if it's open. It's one of our favorite places to visit, so I can never quite believe that many people don't even know the little museum is there.

Which is kind of like Ocean View itself: a lot of people don't know that this quiet-but-colorful neighborhood in Norfolk used to be one of the most popular beach vacation destinations on the East Coast. In its heyday, Ocean View featured an amusement park, resort hotels, a bustling boardwalk and fishing pier.





When my mom was a little girl, her grandparents, my great-grandparents, Anouk's great-greats (!), lived in a little brick house right on the beach in Ocean View, and she and all of her siblings and cousins spent a lot of time there. So Ocean View has a special place in my heart, and it's fun to be able to peek in and take a look at how it used to be. A. and I like to take our time moving through the museum, looking at everything: the old ticket stubs and photographs, old Granby High yearbooks from the 1920s and '30s, and even the restored front car of the Rocket, the amusement park's most popular roller coaster (which was spectacularly demolished in a made-for-TV movie in the 1970s).

More information about the Ocean View Station Museum's hours and exhibits can be found here. Be sure to stop in the next time you return your library books and have a chat with one of the staff, most of whom remember Ocean View the way it used to be and are all too happy to tell you all about it.

Is there a place that means a lot to your family? Tell us about it. And have a great weekend!

Sand Clay

I've had a bag of sand hanging out in the garage since I planted my raspberry bushes a few months ago (they like a mix of sand and soil for good drainage). The hardware store where I bought my bag only carried sand in 50 lb increments, and I only used about 2 lbs in my planting, which means I have 48 left to use up somehow. Enter sand clay.

The texture of this clay is just like a grainy play-dough, but the real fun of it is that it will dry hard, meaning that you can use it to make summer treasures to keep.

Ingredients:

2 cups sand
1 cup cornstarch
1.5 cups water
2 tsps alum (found in the spice aisle)

Directions:

Combine the ingredients over medium-low heat, stirring constantly. Within a few minutes, the dough will begin to thicken up like playdough. Turn out onto a surface, kneading smooth when cool enough to touch. Shape and let dry overnight (or longer) to set. The clay can be stored in an airtight container for three or four days or so.

We made a sand castle, of course, and used our beach toys to cut out shapes and some shells from a recent beach trip to decorate them with. About halfway through I realized I could make Christmas tree ornaments and so I worked on that while A. made a few extremely scary sand snakes. We set our shapes outside in the sun to dry (it took about 12 hours) and put the rest away to play with over the next few days (by the end of day four it was gummy and pretty much finished). And only one piece broke, which is a higher success rate than we've had with either salt clay or baking soda clay.

I think this would be a great craft for when you want a little beachy fun but can't get to the beach, or a creative way to use up some of that sand you might bring back from a special beach vacation. I have a jar of sand somewhere that J. and I brought back from the red sand beaches of Prince Edward Island a few years ago -- if I can find it, I'm going to pull it out and make of ornaments out of it.

That last picture makes me think of this. Snake! A snaaaaake!

The Beach at First Landing State Park

I realized a short while ago that although I lived in the area for the first 17 years of my life, I'd never before gone to the beach at First Landing State Park (though I have spent quite a bit of time on the park's hiking and biking trails). A few weekends ago, we met up with a group of friends -- and their kids of varying ages -- to rectify this oversight. We spent the day getting mildly sunburned and extremely sandy and overall wondering -- what took us so long?

The beach at First Landing is located between the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and Cape Henry, which marks the start of the Atlantic beaches of Virginia Beach. However, the First Landing beach is a quintessential bay beach -- sheltered, protected, with very little surf and almost no waves. This makes it a great place to launch kayaks and also pretty much perfect for little kids (and also for floating in the shallows in a giant inflatable raft, which I mean to do a lot of the next time we go).

Still, the waves that were there were enough to deter Anouk from going near the water -- we're working on undoing some of the trauma that was inflicted from a rogue swell in the face during our Hatteras trip. Her friend A., though, was more than happy to spend as much time as possible wading and watching schools of tiny fish near the shore. Luckily there was more than enough sand to keep our A. occupied, and she enjoyed watching the ships waiting to go through the shipping lanes so much that she did consent (verrrrry warily) to going out for a brief jaunt in Dada's boat.

Best of all from a parent's perspective, First Landing has SHOWERS and RESTROOMS, which bumped it up into the #1 Kid-Friendly Beach Spot in the area in my opinion, surpassing East Beach (which has neither). There's also a wheelchair ramp that goes right down onto the sand, great for strollers, beach carts, or wheelchair-bound beachgoers. A few things to keep in mind if you go -- parking costs $5 on Saturday and Sunday ($4 on the weekdays), and I'm pretty-but-not-totally sure they want that in cash. Also, the lot fills up quickly on the weekends -- we arrived at 11 and got the last parking spot. So get there early or else you'll have to hike over to the beach from across the street.

Seriously -- what did take us so long?

Outer Banks, Part 4: Ocracoke Beach

By the end of our day in Ocracoke Village, all of us were feeling tired and hot and worn out. We had another long ferry ride ahead of us, and were eager to get back to the landing to beat the crowd, and back to our rooms to bask in the glorious air-conditioning. So we almost didn't stop by the beach while we were on the island. But it seemed silly to visit and not even see them, so we pulled off the road in a fit of spontaneity, found a cut in the dunes, and followed the sound of the crashing waves until we came to the beach.

I'm really glad we stopped, because the Ocracoke beaches are probably the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen. In fact, they routinely make the list of top 10 beaches in America, and were named America's #1 best beach in 2007. I don't profess to be a great photographer, but looking at the photos I took the day we went, I think you can figure out why. Acres of golden sand (the Ocracoke beaches are WIDE beaches), water in all shades of blue and green, with shaving-cream whitecaps roaring in almost on top of one another (the Ocracoke beaches are also LOUD. The crashing surf, and all that).

And no people. The Ocracoke beaches (which span the whole eastern side of the island) are federally protected, which means no buildings (though there is a campsite and a lifeguarded beach toward the southern end of the island). There was nary even any a footprint on the sand, and only a few boats on the horizon and a few dune buggies way way off let us know we hadn't been accidentally shipwrecked on a deserted island. It felt like we were the only people for miles (maybe we were?)

We had all brought swimming gear with us, but we didn't end up swimming. It felt like enough to walk and explore. We waded, we jumped the waves, we collected shells (there were heaps of perfect untouched specimens), we found a tone of little coves and hollows in the dunes. We collected sea glass. And then we just sat for a while and stared out and out at the waves.

Next time we go, we're doing it right. Lawn chairs, a cooler of drinks, umbrellas, sunshades, toys, a good book (or two, or three). And we'll spend the whole day. If a scant hour on the beach can make me smile as I think of it two weeks later, a whole stretch of them together might alter my mood permanently.

Outer Banks, Part 2: Hatteras Island

After our stint on Bodie Island last week, James had to go home to work, but Anouk and I headed south to Hatteras Island to meet up with family. We stayed in Buxton -- about midway down the island, a good middle point right smack dab between Pea Island and Hatteras Village. It was only a little over an hour away from where we'd been staying in Kitty Hawk, but the feel of the place was totally different. The further south we drove, the more of a laid-back small country town vibe we encountered. But there were still tons of things to do and see.

We started each day of our trip with breakfast at the Orange Blossom Bakery & Cafe. I feel like this is notable, because when I'm on vacation, there's not a lot that can get me out of my PJs and on the road before 10 or so. However, if you want to get one of the Orange Blossom's apple uglies (giant, delicious apple fritters), you need to get there before they sell out. So we got up bright and early, and off we went.

^^ They call them apple uglies for a reason. And that reason is deception.

Another must-see is the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which has the distinction of being the tallest lighthouse in the United States. In fact, it was so much fun that our group visited twice. The view from the top is supposed to be fantastic (the my cousins swore they could see for miles), but the climb is arduous, especially in hot weather -- akin to climbing a 12-story building with no air conditioning. Kids under 42" can't go to the top, children under 12 have to be accompanied by an adult, and during the height of the season, wait times to climb can be 30-60 minutes. Unfortunately, Anouk and I had to wait down below, but luckily there was enough to see around the grounds and in the museum that we didn't feel cheated (the exhibit on how the lighthouse was moved over a half-mile from its original location was truly fascinating.)

And of course, there was the beach. The beach! Just a few short steps from our front door -- we could hear the waves all night, even with the windows closed. It almost seems inaccurate to say that we went to the beach while we were in town because it didn't seem like we were ever very far away from it. Wherever we looked, there was golden sand and deep blue water. Anouk was still a little afraid of the water, but the big girls and I jumped right in. And we taught cousin D. to body surf -- her first time ever in the ocean. She took to it like a pro (and those aren't beginner-type waves).

A few more notes about places to go in the Buxton (and surrounding) area: Conner's Supermarket, which looks like a standard grocery store but actually has a great selection of organic and local foods; The Captain's Table, which has the best Hatteras-style clam chowder I've ever tasted; Uglie Mugs Coffee Shop and Haoles Sushi a few miles north in Avon; Buxton Village Books, which offers a great selection of books about the Outer Banks; Buxton Cemetery (make sure you have four-wheel drive). And I also highly suggest just turning down one of the many roads off of the sound side of Highway 12 around about sunset. Because you might just get a view like this:

And that's something definitely worth seeing.

Outer Banks, Part 1: Bodie Island

I read a study once that said that staring out at the line where sea meets sky produces an endorphin effect in the brain that stimulates feelings of relaxation and peace. I figure that after working our way up and down the Outer Banks last week, J., A. and I must be the most peaceful and relaxed people on the planet. Because there was a lot of sitting, staring, and relaxing.

Our OBX trip -- Anouk's first -- began with a weekend in Kitty Hawk with our friends M. and A. Of course the beach was the star -- specifically, the public beach across from the Kitty Hawk Bath House, which I highly recommend for beachgoers with kids. Not only is it beautiful and great for swimming, it features both lifeguard stands and outdoor showers. Fighting sand in your car is always a losing battle, but it still feels good to make the effort.

As soon as we set her down on the sand, Anouk ran headlong for the ocean, not knowing yet how much more powerful the OBX waves are than the ones at our local beaches. After the first one knocked her flat, she made sure to keep her distance for the rest of our stay. But she still found plenty to do on the beach -- building sand castles, watching the surfers, and leaving a trail of "pinthetheth" everywhere she went.

We also made time to explore the newly reopened Bodie Island Light Station in Nags Head. The lighthouse completed its years-long renovations in April, with the tower open to the public for the first time since 1872. Anouk was pretty impressed even with the view from the ground -- she kept pointing at the lighthouse and saying, "Wow! That's BIG!"





^^ And to take a (tiny) family portrait. We don't remember to get enough of these.

Another highlight of our trip was stopping by the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center in the afternoon to check out the day's catch. Around 3:00 or so, the fishing boats start rolling in and unloading their hauls. Some had pretty impressive catches (including one group who'd hooked a cobia that was about as big as Anouk). We also had a lot of fun looking at the names painted on the backs of the boats and decided what we would call our boats if we had them (mine isn't kid-friendly so I won't write it here. But think of Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction and you'll get it).

And of course, there was the food. We did some serious eating while we were in town. There's nothing like sea air to work up an appetite and the Kitty Hawk/Kill Devil Hills area offers some of the best restaurants in the Banks. Breakfast from Max's Real Bagels, fresh fish for dinner from the Austin Seafood Company, sweet potato biscuits from Dune's, lunch by the sea at Beachside Bistro... I'm sure I gained three pounds in the three days we were there. But you know it was worth every ounce.

Even with all this running around, there's still a ton on Bodie Island that we didn't get to. Jockey's Ridge, the Wright Brothers Memorial, the Children at Play Museum... I guess we'll just have to plan to go back really soon.

Stay tuned for our adventures in Hatteras and points south. Happy Monday!