What to do. What to do?

There weren’t any yurts to clean the other day and the weather was spectacular.  No jacket and no long-johns spectacular.  So, to earn our hours, off we went with our liter picker uppers.

We wandered down to the beach.  Do you see the smoke in the left hand side of the photo?

As it turns out someone had started a fire with a bunch of the drift logs.  That’s a no-no.  They also left it unattended.  That’s no-no times two.  So, we spent some time putting it out.

We continued down the beach to collect trash but got distracted by the colors in the sand.

Thankfully there weren’t too many large pieces of liter.  There are millions of very tiny ones though.  It is hard to imagine that trash from the Tsunami that hit Thailand still washes up on this very beach.  We won’t show you trash though (unless we find something really cool, which we haven’t… yet).

This is a sand flea carcass.  Nicole remembers catching these in Florida and her Grandpa would fish with them.  The ones she’d catch in Florida were at their largest about the size of the first section of her thumb.  This one was as big as a walnut!  They grow ‘em BIG in Oregon.

The tide was really low and exposed some rock and fossils that we hadn’t yet seen.

           This one is longer than our hand and looks like a small version of a conch shell.

We watched a guy cracking open rock to expose fossils inside.  We’ll have to try it one day and see what we can come up with.  Meanwhile…

       With the weather being so nice we also explored and cleaned the Spencer Creek Trail.

                                As the name implied, it runs along Spencer Creek.

           
                                         Sometimes it is misty and mysterious.

                       
     The trail winds through a riparian area that is lush with ferns and moss strewn trees.

         

            
              The area is home to a wide variety of Fungi like the orange in this photo.

         
                                           Some looked like ocean coral.

         

                                                Others were more familiar.
         

                                       There were the creepy crawly things…

         
                                                   just hanging around

         
                                       and inching along like this white slug.

         
            We found three of these our first day and eleven the next.  Can you see it?

         
                                                       How about now?

         
                                                      This is Newton

         
                                                      the super cute

         
                                                              NEWT.

                       And that’s what we do when there aren’t any yurts to clean.
                      (Maybe we should’ve taken a picture of all the trash we collected.)