Sweet Summer Evenings

The days are getting shorter, but suddenly we are getting blessed with some late summer warmth again (and we're very happy about it given the horrible Summer we've had).

Last night we thoroughly enjoyed one of our favorite activities, riding down to the beach to enjoy the sunset after dinner. It was a perfect night for it, I'm sad that there won't be many more nights like this before the short days of Fall set it. We headed out about 6:30pm, and rode through the neighborhood to visit the bees that make our favorite honey by the railroad tracks, they were all coming back to their hives for the night when we got there (C is just jumping off the tracks in this photo, he's not afraid of the bees he loves them).

It's about a mile and a half down to the beach, and we were lucky that the skeeters weren't out as we made our way through the woods. At the beach there is a big treehouse built over the years by teenagers that have stacked long pieces of driftwood between the branches to build four big platforms way up in this cool old tree. It's always fun to see what changes have been made over the week as logs are added and removed. Today we discovered that either the city or the Port (the park is stuck between jurisdictions) knocked down all the wood from the tree and sawed them into smaller pieces so they couldn't be rebuilt. I know it was a lawsuit waiting to happen, but it's been a fixture of the beach for so many years that it was sad to see it gone. I'll try to find a photo somewhere- it was pretty to look at in it's own way.

I think the beach is about the perfect place for a little boy to be, it has all the elements they need to get a good nights sleep:Tree climbing, stick fighting, rock throwing, fort building and water splashing.

After C climbed out of the tree to do a little sword fighting I noticed a leaf stuck tight to his back. It turned out to be this:

I wish I was a better photographer because that there is the biggest fattest weirdest looking "caterpillar" I have ever seen. About the size of my ring finger (when he's not stretched out), with a blue pointy spike tail on his rear and a huge mouth with yellow lines on his cheeks. Honestly, around here you just don't see behemoth bugs, so I was a little weirded out that he could be some Chinese Death Beetle larvae. Needless to say, we didn't touch him. But we did try to be hospitable and get him back onto some greenery.

Maybe I'll read in the paper next week that the treehouse was chopped down because of of an infestation of Toxic Gypsy Worms that eat small children. And here were were trying to feed him leaves, silly us.