Today was spent at Seal Beach, a beautiful beach about 45 minutes away from my sister’s house. Seal Beach is one of those California beaches that reminds you of the reason why Southern California is so crowded: everyone agrees it’s a great place to be.

It’s such an idyllic beach that one wonders whether one is plugged into the Matrix. Shops, surf, sand, and a pier with a restaurant at the end of it. The only imperfection was one or two pieces of floating litter in the surf, although perhaps even that was provided by the Matrix to prevent our primitive cerebrums from rejecting it.

Here, Dana and Lizbeth smile through their sunglasses from the spot we picked out while Savanna dries off from an initial tumultuous encounter with the Mighty Sea.



Below, Chloe and Georgia begin work on what will become a much more ambitious edifice:



Savanna and I took a jog down to the end of the beach and back. One of the things I enjoy about going down to sea level from Tucson’s height of 2400 feet is that there’s so much more oxygen in the air, allowing one to run much farther before getting winded. The view as we ran was beautiful: ships and tugboats moved slowly across the horizon as the lazy calls of foghorns drifted over the water.

At Savanna’s request, we bought boogie-boards at a nearby shop. Proving once again how poor a predictor of fun I am, I thought this would be a waste of time, and not much better than simple body-surfing. But in a little while, we got the hang of it and we were riding waves all the way up to the shore. I can confirm that a boogie-board is a much better vehicle for this than one’s own unadorned carcass. It was especially fun when I hit a wave perfectly and was able to ride it until I was still moving atop a paper-thin sheet of foam, gliding gently to a stop on the beach and evoking the eponymous mascot of Seal Beach itself.

We had intended to eat lunch at the restaurant at the end of the pier, but it turned out that the pier, and thus the restaurant, were closed for construction. We hadn’t brought enough food for a full lunch, and while we were dithering about what to do, Dana chose to accept the Lunch Mission. Finding food that would satisfy everyone from toddlers to adults is generally a puzzle, as anyone who has juggled fast-food orders from within a minivan knows, but Dana returned shortly thereafter with a genius solution to this Gordian knot: pizza! I had never before had pizza on the beach, but I can tell you that it is fantastic. Below, Savanna agrees with me:



The only unpleasant souvenir that Lizbeth and I returned with was a powerful sunburn. It is a little awkward to explain how two adult semi-natives from Tucson would allow themselves to get broiled like a couple of solar newbies, but I’ll try. First of all, I want to emphasize that the kids did not get burned in the slightest. Knowing that they would be exposed to the sun all day, we used some super-magic sunscreen of Dana’s which basically created an invisible UV force field around them.

But Lizbeth and I relied on an older and less effective technology called “Cloth”, which, I am sorry to report, does not work nearly so well. Lizbeth did not intend to cavort under the sun at all, so she wore a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, a hat, and used various towels and blankets to cover the ends of her limbs. But, during a nap, the wind moved the blankets and she got badly burned. I myself used sunscreen everywhere except under my shirt—I wore this shirt most of the day and figured it was enough. It definitely was not. Below, you can see the shirt…



…and one obvious reason why it might not have worked so well. (It doesn’t protect me when Chloe is wearing it.)

Next: the Bissell House!