The Beach Life

Wow, this blog has definitely missed out on some highlights in the last year or so! I don't even know where to start, so I'll just start with our latest adventure yesterday! I will be missing a lot of details, but in the last year we have moved 3 times and ended up in Southern California. A place I have always WANTED to live, but didn't think we would ever end up here. I always loved the beach, but never knew how much I would love having access to beauty and therapy within an hour (if you miss the traffic, of course).

So, here we are in Murrieta, CA. It's part of what's called Inland Empire in Riverside County. It is an hour from the beach and an hour from the mountains (and snow! if we ever want to mess with that stuff again, lol). We would have loved to have been closer to the beach, but it's more affordable here and also a great family community with a high concentration of LDS members. Exactly what we were looking for...that, and somewhere we could possibly be grounded for a while. No promises, but that's what we really want and what we feel is best for our girls. It is so hard to leave forever friends.

On to our adventure... well, the day didn't really start out as planned, but ended up being great. There is a new LDS movie out "Once I Was A Beehive" and we found out that it was going to be at a theater in San Diego (about 45 minutes away). Since we have 2 Beehives in the family (Brynley and Brooklyn-can you believe THAT??) I really wanted to take them and make a day out of it. They don't have school on Fridays, so we planned on an earlier show and then thought we would check out a beach and hang out for a few hours. The movie was AWESOME! The girls and I all laughed and cried...who knows, maybe Ric even got teary-eyed. We even nerded out and clapped after the movie! We went and had lunch and then I researched which beach would be the best. We decided on Shell Beach; not really knowing what to expect, but it sounded very intriguing and exciting!

It was actually raining lightly before the movie, so we weren't sure what the weather was going to be like, but it turned out gorgeous! We parked and walked down a steep staircase and through a park towards the ocean. We got to the steep cliffs with the ocean below, then walked down a little ways to another set of steep stairs leading down to a small beach. We took our shoes off to walk across the sand, and it was soft, but gritty. It felt SO nice...Come to find out that the beach is full of small shells and sea glass! We could have spent the whole day there, but we only had a couple of hours before we had to head back. It wasn't really a beach for swimming in the ocean, but we had such a great time scouring the sand for unique sea shells and sea glass. Brooklyn had fun pretending that she was Ariel from The Little Mermaid with the waves crashing behind her on the rock. Ric finally took his shoes off and got in the ocean a bit and even found the girls a little crab hiding in the rocks.

We hesitantly dried our feet off; put our shoes back on and started the trek back up to the car. It didn't hurt that we were bribed with ice cream. :) We enjoyed our cones and took in as much as we could of the beach life, and then headed back home.