First of all, I must give credit for this photo to my amazing uncle– The Dutchman.
Second, you must understand I grew up along the ocean in Conneticut where the beaches tend to be rocky and the sand is NOT fine grain. I moved to San Diego and well, let’s be honest their beaches are cold. And, The Princess and Cinco are growing up in the desert. Fine grain sand, YES. Water, NO.
So I am not the biggest fan of beaches. But these were amazing. We started out with a little cloudy weather, but being from the ever sunny desert the clouds were a welcome change.
Day 2
The Princess is an expert shell hunter. You may call last summer when she found a giant scallop shell on Inich Beach in Ireland. And, amazingly we managed to get the shell home without breaking it!!!
As for finding shells at Orange Beach, we were very successful. I found a shell page on a Florida travel site and circled the shells we found as we went along.
DAY 3
One of the day’s The Professor and The Dutchman rented a pontoon boat complete with a second level slide. We puttered around Ono Island and slid into the water quite a few times. The Princess even managed to spot a pod of about 4 or 5 dolphins.
We also explored the sand bars and small islands in the area and meet some more sea creatures. We encountered a good number of salt water hermit crabs and I managed to find a few inhabited shells for the kids to take home!
Cinco and The Princess also really wanted to get some hermit crabs… And somehow I talked into going to the Mexican swap meet when get home to buy hermit crabs. I truly hoping this kids forget about this by the time the vacation ends.
I strayed from the group for awhile and had a face off with a rather large blue crab. He was hanging out in a tidal pool. I didn’t have my phone, so I couldn’t get a photo. But as we circled around each other I noticed he refused to turn his back on me. And, at no point did he try to make a run for it. He stood his ground throughout our encounter.
Day 4
It was another day spent at the beach. The amazing thing about this day were a huge cluster of starfish that were drifting back and forth in the low tide. We spent quite a bit of time examining the starfish and we throw a good number back in deeper water to save them.
We also found a number of rather small sand dollars. We later learned that sand dollars are a type of sea urchin– news to me! But I guess they are losely related to the starfish.
The Booky Mom 