It’s beach season again (but you wouldn’t know it from the weather in Everett today, which is cool and drizzly).  We are extremely fortunate here to have a plethora of beaches available to us within an hour or two drive.  If you asked us, our most favorite beach is the Dungeness Spit National Wildlife Refuge on the north Olympic Peninsula.  We take a ferry, and then drive to Sequim, and walk down the bluff path to the Spit.  The Spit has two sides, one facing the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the other facing a tidal pond, out of the wind.  Two beaches in one, what a bargain!

At the tip of the five-mile-long Spit, there is a lighthouse, and you can walk all the way.  It is extremely strenuous, though, so most people stay pretty close to the bluffs.

The beach has all sorts of driftwood logs.

Last year, we discovered a beach that we had never been to before, at Picnic Point County Park.  We will definitely be going back there this year!

There’s a little creek that ends in Puget Sound, and winds through a little delta.  The kids had great fun walking in the water, and building little dams.  There are also a couple of derelict piers, whose only remaining signs are the broken upright pillars.

Our Pacific Northwest beaches tend to be very rocky, as their sand is mostly made of broken pieces of the Cascade Mountains.  But we have been to places where the sand was fine, and the beaches wide.  Like Cape May, New Jersey, on the Atlantic Ocean.  We went there in 2012, about five days before superstorm Sandy hit.  The beach was mostly empty, except for the flocks of seabirds.

Mixed flock of shorebirds, Cape May

Beach, Cape May, NJ

We also went to Hawaii, where the beaches varied, depending on which island we visited.

This is a beach on the Kona Coast of the Big Island of Hawaii.  The beach has lots of volcanic rock, which hasn’t made much sand yet.

The above photos are from Lahaina on Maui.  The kind of beach you might expect in Hawaii.  Unfortunately, on our cruise we didn’t get much time to go beach walking.

Of course, within a ten-minute drive, we have the beaches at Silver Lake-

and Edmonds.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we never lack for beaches, and we go any time, any season, rain or shine.

Here’s the Link to Terri’s Original Post for this week.