Ruby Beach

Today we needed to go grocery shopping, we needed to look for a dresser since our clothes have been in piles on our floor for a month, we needed to decide what we were doing with Josh's car that is currently broken down in the parking lot at work, and we needed to clean the house. Then we woke up and realized it was 70 and sunny and not raining, so we went to Ruby Beach instead.

Or more accurately we tried to go to Ruby Beach and ended up at another beach instead. But at the end of the day, having finally found Ruby Beach we decided that Beach #4 ended up being much cooler anyway. For those non-washingtonites out there, Ruby Beach is in the Olympic National Park, it's about 30 miles south of Forks and about an hour and a half from our house. Maybe the vampires should have spent some time on the coast, maybe they wouldn't have been so cranky.

It was the perfect day. We checked our tide table before we went so we could be there at low tide and explore the tide pools. It was an excellent idea. Turns out tide pools are pretty stinking awesome and filled with giant, colorful starfish the likes of which I've only seen on nature documentaries. Anyway, enjoy the pictures, and then book your ticket for coming to visit me. I promise I'll take you to Ruby Beach.

Actually I forgot my camera and have never been more upset about forgetting my camera (aside from Cooper's blessing day) so I took the best I could with my phone.

Look at this sexy baby-wearing dad. Cooper lasted about ten minutes in the baby bjorn. Cooper hates his stroller, his car seat, the baby bjorn, anything that's designed to make life easier for his parents.

The first view of the beach from the trail.

The little trail that takes you down to the coast.

And spits you out at the beach.

Always wandering off...

This facial expression is the EXACT weirdo face Josh makes at me all the time. Stinkers.

An AWESOME tide pool. See the little orange star fish in the corner? Don't worry I have about 800 more pictures of starfish.

Look at these cute things! I always thought starfish were like the size of a quarter, I don't know why. But these things were the size of my face. And soooo colorful. I wanted to keep one.

Do you see all these little green sea urchin things? Soooo neat. 

Those black things are just walls of mussels. There were a few tide pools we couldn't get to because there were so many mussels and I didn't want to crush them.

These mussels were HUGE.

This was my favorite starfish. Orangey.

Another beautiful tide pool.

I love tide pools.

Cooper was so excited to be outside in the sun looking at all the scenery and not inside playing with his toys... Not. Poor buddy, we keep making him go places. Josh is trying to whistle at him to look at the camera. For some reason Cooper only responds to whistling, like a puppy.

This one is actually Ruby Beach. We finally found it after spending a few hours at the other beach, and it proved to be a little disappointing. Too rocky. Plus Cooper was DONE beach-combing at this point.

Come visit me!!