all beauty comes with a price... pain

I went to the Foster Avenue Beach today with my roommate and it was a lovely afternoon. The sky was perfectly clear and crayon box sky blue. The water was warm enough to swim in and cool enough to be refreshing. There was a breeze so it wasn't too hot, but not so much that the sand got in your face while you read. The Neat Sheet was just the right size for two people to lay on towels. Even though there were lots of people, it wasn't crowded. There was plenty of personal space and you didn't have to step on anyone's stuff to get to and from the water or the sidewalk. The people watching was superb. I want to go to the beach everyday in the summer, instead of CSSI.

I remembered to put on sunscreen (which I failed to do when I went to the Taste last Saturday) but still, burned! The backs of my legs hurt oh-so-much (see, the beach would be way better than my desk tomorrow =] ), and I missed a part of my back. My face and arms just have good color/monstrous freckles and the fronts of my legs are starting the freckle on the pasty white background. Oh, do my legs hurt. ow ow ow.

Still, depsite that last paragraph of whining, the beach was wonderful. This was the first time I'd ever gone to a Lake Michican beach in my "adult" life. It was much better than expected.

I forgot to rave about the water clarity. It was a sandy bottom beach with NO lakeweed (a relative of seaweed, usually pretty bad by now in MN lakes), though there was some floating plant matter. There are a few options... they chemically treat it to death, they mow it very regularly (yes, you can mow the lakeweed, its a special mower-boat), Lake Michigan isn't weedy (I highly doubt that), all the activity prevents it from growing, the lake is so polluted that it can't grow (also unlikely) (as far as I've observed in the land of 10,000 lakes, more pollution = more lakeweed) or the weed somehow doesn't grow in the shallow water area of the beach. Besides the lack of lakeweed, the water was just generally very clear. I felt more comfortable going under than I do in many parts of Lake Minnetonka, mostly because I could see the bottom.

also, no fish, dead or alive. I didn't expect live ones with so much activity, but no dead ones either was a pleasant thing. and no rocks (definitely a man-made beach).

Keep Smiling! =) (and an end to my overuse of parenthetical commentary)