Exploring we will go...

One afternoon while John was at the office Grace and I decided to discover a "new" beach.  Long Beach is about 30 minutes from our front door, it seemed easy enough to find so we set out without a map, big mistake when I am behind the wheel.  After a few missed turns and a little drive out of the way we turned down the road we had been searching for and found ourselves at our destination.  By far this is my favorite beach, sloping shoreline, massive cliffs, huge caves and not a soul besides us to share it with.  Of course as soon as we stepped foot on the sand my camera battery died, so the pictures below are from the following day.  Grace and I enjoyed it so much that the very next day we went back and took John with us.

On this day Grace and I were better dressed to explore some of the caves, we had proper clothing and headlamps!! There are many, many caves along the shore some you'd want a harness and rope to get to, but most are down at ground level.  One in particular is HUGE, with several rooms off the main opening.  Grace and I strapped our head lamps on and began our exploration.  We began on our hand and knees and were quickly lowered to the army crawl, with Grace leading we made it pretty far back in the tunnel.  We decided to turn around when we encountered a small pool of water and a petrified pile of poop.... We found a spot to turn around and headed back.  After exiting this room we quickly went to the other tunnel we had in our minds to explore.  It was a shorter crawl into another smaller room, probably just big enough for me to sit up right.  Grace was again the lead explorer, she was crawling around the little room when I popped my head in just in time to hear her say "WOW! Look mommy! EGGS!!!!"  Hmmm, how do I feel about crawling into a deep, dark, damp hole where there is a nest of about 6-8 eggs.... Yeah, not great.  I took a look at the eggs, bigger than chicken eggs for sure, white or at least creamy in color, and they appeared to have been buried in the sand.  After a bit of online research, best we could figure was that it was a Penguin's nest. 

Fueled by the recent discoveries Grace was ready to crawl back into every other crevice we could find.  So we continued our walk along the beach but found no more tunnels quite at exciting as those.  I had packed us a picnic lunch, so once back in the warmth of the sun and out of the shadows of the cliffs we sat and enjoyed our sandwiches and apples.  

You can't see it in this picture, but in the grasses on the top of the cliffs were sheep grazing.  Some of them were quite close to the edge, like mountain goats.

The first of these two pictures are of Grace running to share with John the new of our great discovery... The Eggs.

The second is of Grace at the end of our adventure, covered in sand, dirt and god knows what else.

-At a later date, while running shuttle for our sea kayaking trip which you'll read about in a later post,  I was retelling this story to our friend Yan, who said that they were most likely Penguin eggs.  Although it is an odd time of year for any animal to have a nest of eggs, Penguins seemed like the most reasonable explanation.