Summer at the Beach: Day Trip to Westport, WA

Westport, Washington

What is summer without at least a few days at a beach?  My husband and I took a day trip from Seattle to Westport, Washington.  The Pacific Coast is about a 3-hour drive from our home in the city.  Hours at the beach and nothing to do but watch the waves and clouds, settle down with a good book, enjoy the parade of families and dogs and surfers frolicking in the water, listen to the rhythmic pounding of the breakers and waves lapping at the shore — quintessential summer.  My husband brought back enough fish for supper.  I brought back a few patches of sunburn (yes, I burn even under cloudy skies) and a few good photos.

I do love our ocean beaches.

A patch of blue

Bluff overlooking the beach at Westport

Dune path

Seagull

You never know what you’ll find washed up on the beach.

Sand dollar

Some views from the jetty:

Surfers, Westport, WA

 

 

Collections

“It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.”
     — Robert Louis Stevenson

Moon snail shells I have collected

Moon snail shells

My collection of sand dollars

Today’s post is inspired by Lisa Congdon’s blog http://collectionaday2010.blogspot.com.  My friend Lynne recently turned me on to this charming site, where every day Congdon posts a photograph or drawing of one of her collections.  It’s not easy to photograph inanimate objects!

I battle internally between collecting things that appeal to me and getting rid of clutter.  I find it amusing that others have had to justify their passions for collecting, as Samuel Johnson does here:

“The pride or the pleasure of making collections, if it be restrained by prudence or morality, produces a pleasing remission after more laborious studies; furnishes an amusement not wholly unprofitable for that part of life, the greater part of many lives, which would otherwise be lost in idleness or vice; it produces an useful traffick between the industry of indigence and the curiosity of wealth; it brings many things to notice that would be neglected; and, by fixing the thoughts upon intellectual pleasures, resists the natural encroachments of sensuality, and maintains the mind in her lawful superiority.”

Sea-born Treasures

Sand dollar hidden in beach sand

Sand dollar and stones on the beach

The riches of sea-born treasures

“I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.
     — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Each and All”