Agates, Seals, and Florence

We went to Muriel O. Ponsler Beach again to escape rising pollen levels and to search for agates.  This is the time of year when the pollen levels start to rise; the trees are very active right now, and I'm not looking forward to when the grasses start up—after an hour of typing outside, my laptop, keyboard, and mouse have a dusty yellow coating.  It's good for Mark to get out of the pollen and it's also good for him to get out of the house and into nature.

Mark is a natural early riser.  I pulled myself out of bed at 5 AM and we managed to leave the house a little before 6, just after sunrise.  By pre-arrangement, Mark drove, and I napped a little.  

I must have misread the tide tables, because at a quarter 'til 8 the tide was much, much higher than I thought it would have been.  "You be sure to keep an eye on the ocean," Mark warned.  "Don't think I didn't see you last month, standing on a rock, surrounded by water, with a funny look on your face."  (Reader, I was in no danger of inundation, and the retreating flow of the ocean around the rock formed a natural deposit of agates and stones of interesting nature.)

When we got to the beach, there were only three or so other folks there, so we could let Aoife off leash while we threw her ball for her and hunted for agates.  Sometimes she'll drop her ball on top of an agate, at least for Mark, but this time around we stumbled over two really large ones on our own.

Afterward, Mark wanted to go to the Strawbery Hill park and look for seals.  I was hoping that I'd be able to photograph them, but they were mostly in the water.  The tide and foam and my far-sightedness made it difficult to zoom in on them with my camera.  It was easier to get images of cormorants.  I was hoping that I might catch a pelican or two, but they were too far out to get a good likeness. 

We were in Florence by noon, where we walked along the streets and docks.  Florence is a very dog-friendly town, which I hadn't realized until then.  That said, Aoife was very leery about going down one ramp. They've made an effort to have interesting art along the paths—an icosahedron caught my eye; I thought it was welded metal, but I think it something else.  

We grabbed a light snack from a dock chowder stand, but the combination of Three Aggressive Dogs (snarling and lunging), hot noon-time sun, and a busy dock wasn't the best for the dog (she didn't like it when a boat bumped into the dock next to us), so we ate quickly.  

The nice thing about leaving for the coast at dawn is that one can spend a sufficient amount of time enjoying it and still get home by mid-afternoon.