Once More Unto The Beach

Everyday we seem to be getting motivated and starting out later and later. Today we didn't even leave for the beach until almost eleven. And I've learned that if you're already sunburned, you can actually make it worse.


Quinn finally showed some signs of rebounding and wanting to get in the waves some, but still most of the time he just sat in the sand and had races with some plastic cars. He's just not as interested as running around in the waves as he was at the start of last week. Guess the novelty has already worn off. Maybe two weeks in a row is just too much beach time for them. Last year we went twice for a week at a time versus this year we decided to see what it would be like to go for two weeks straight.


The waves weren't anywhere near as strong as they had been for the previous three days. Guess we're finally done with seeing the effects of that storm that was off the coast.




Since we're in a different house, we're accessing the beach from a different location. So far both Ginger and I liked the old area better. She liked the old area because it was less crowded. I liked it for that reason plus the 'scenery' was better (seemed there were more college kids). You can tell the beach area we're at now is a family oriented area beach. And it is crowded like nobody's business. Before it was pretty easy to move around the blanket / umbrella and get some shots of the kids that didn't have people in the background or unwanted elements in the shots. Not so at the beach we're at now.


Catherine and Amanda picked up a friend to play with for a while. But then the kids got on each other's nerves as everyone had their own way they wanted to put sand into the buckets and would get upset when one of the other kids did something different.

We visited the Go-Kart race track again today. Quinn got pretty upset when we got there, because he wanted to do the junior cars again so he could drive solo, but they stop doing those at five and we got there well after seven (we didn't know that before we went or we would have tried to convince him to wait until another day). Earlier in the day when we had been talking about who was going to be driving, Catherine had wanted to drive with me since Quinn was going to be riding by himself (or so we thought at the time). So once Quinn couldn't go by himself, Quinn got really upset when he we suggested he ride with Ginger (something about her not driving fast enough). Luckily Ken was there and agreed to go with Quinn and Amanda would ride with Karen. Ginger was then designated the official photographer for the event.


Check out Ken doing his best Micheal Jordan driving impersonation up above. When we got onto the track, Catherine had picked a car for us at the very back of the pack, so we started out a couple cars from last (two cars behind Karen and Amanda and I think three behind Ken and Quinn). That didn't last long though as Catherine and I tore through the track. There were a couple of kids in single cars that were faster than us, but we managed to pass everyone else we came across.


We passed Karen and Amanda on the second or third lap. Karen claims we bumped her, but really what had happened they took the turn pretty wide and that allowed us to take control of the inside lane. They didn't see us and ran into our side (so really they bumped us). It took us a lot longer to weed through all the other cars to catch up to Ken and Quinn though (since they were passing cars also). And once we caught up to them we got stuck behind them for several laps, but we finally managed to sneak by with help from a slower single car that was blocking them. Too bad the race ended like one lap after we got past them.


Catherine and I were basking in our victory we when left the facility. Outside there was a kid siting next to his dad and I overhead their conversation. It went something like this with the kid saying "I'm never doing that again." And the dad asked "Why not?" And the kid responds with "Some of those people were driving really aggressive, the yellow 38 car and especially the blue number 12 car." I thought about it for a second and realized Catherine and I were the blue number 12 car. I felt kind of bad and tried to apologize to the kid (although to be honest, I didn't even remember seeing the kid on the track, so we must have smoked him pretty early in the race).


By the time the racing was done, it was clear I wasn't going to be able to get to anyplace to take a really good sunset picture. So Catherine and I walked down the pier to see if we could salvage any sunset shots while Ginger and Quinn watched the next Go-Kart race.


Not sure what the deal was, but conditions for sunset shots just weren't that great (there wasn't exactly a lot to work with there on a pier with no railing or anything either though). And the sun wasn't really cooperating either. Not sure what the atmosphere conditions need to be to get that golden glow, but whatever they are they definitely weren't there tonight.

Ginger and Quinn joined us just before the sun finally set. The camera obviously has some trouble trying to determine what area to use as the exposure setting when you put people in the shot as well. I might be able to fix that some by applying a filter of some type to the background, but I'm just not motivated to do it right now.