the queen travels: Thermal pools make up for a rainy day

3 Thermal pools make up for a rainy day

On March 12, Sunday, we drove north, hoping to find some birding places. The one we thought we could find you have to take a ferry to get to it. So instead we had coffee and met some nice people and I got a dog fix for the day, a Golden Retriever named Richie.

Richie is 17 months old and a very nice boy.

We even found a farmer’s market and got some apples and carrots and grapes. The carrots were sweet and the apples were the best. The apples here have been wonderful and we’ve been eating a lot of them. We haven’t found a bad one yet.

The market had some great looking produce but we only got apples and some of the sweetest carrots I've ever eaten.

We've become zebras.

And there is the zebra crossing, white painted lines, and black and white painted poles. These are to be sure we cross where we are supposed to. But we didn't.

We've seen tons of gulls, with a number of varieties. This is a red-beaked gull. They are kind of pretty. I don't know why I keep taking gull photos as they're just scavengers. It must be because they always look so clean.

We drove around and found the thermal pools. We decided as it was rather crappy weather we might as well get wet. We’d brought our swimsuits in anticipation of a thermal dip, and this one was exceptional. There were multiple pools with a variety of temperatures. It appeared that with some old coot in the pool with his younger partner (maybe) that there was more rising than just the water temperature.

As we were already wet, we decided to walk on the nearby beach. The tide was still going out so we could walk quite a ways. Wouldn’t you know that as soon as we were about as far away as we could get from the car that it would start raining again. It’s not that Stef and I would melt from the rain, it was our cameras we were concerned about.

It wasn't sunny, but it was still beautiful.

While wet the sand isn't white, but figure it is when dry.

We walked nearly out to that little mound in the distance as the tide was going out, out, out.

Oyster catchers.

My water shoes show up quite well in the water. Had to get my feet in it.

When we got about as far away from the car as we could on the beach, it started to rain.

Even heading back, I had to stop to take photos. The sand and water makes such pretty designs.

And I couldn't resist little birdy feet.

A couple of folks on horses added to the fun on the beach.

This isn't great, but all of that is shells that had washed up into a couple of areas near the shore.

We headed back to the thermal pools to have another dip prior to heading back to town. We hadn't taken cameras into the thermal pools. It could have been ugly with photos of all the old white-haired folks. Haha. There were lots of young people there, too, and it was just so pleasant to relax until your skin turned all pruney.

Once back we wandered down to the docks again. We like to see the ships and even found some additional restaurants we’d not seen before. We waited for one of the ships to cast off. They were having some problems but we couldn’t quite make it out over the loudspeaker since it was at a distance.

A pied shag swam around waiting for either handouts or a fish to dive after.

Even so there was entertainment. A gull had a fish and didn’t want to relinquish it to anyone else. We watched and had to be content for this to be our real bird siting for the day. And we continued to wait for the ship to leave. We waited in vain.