(Disclaimer: All pictures shown in this post have been snagged from various sites on the Internet, as I neglected to bring my camera with me. Except the one of the car really is my sister and her car - she emailed it to me. But I am sure you will get the gist of the day anyway.)
We drove up to Patricia Beach in Melissa's brand new Mini Cooper S Clubman that she picked up just days ago. Neat little car, that! Lots of ponies under the hood and spaceous to boot.
When we headed up, the weather was quite overcast, although the temperature was about 30 degrees C at that time (just after noon). It looked quite like this:
We picked Patricia Beach because it is a lot less crowded than the more popular Grand Beach:
Patricia Beach tends to be more of a family oriented beach, whereas Grand is the meat market kind of place.
Because it was quite overcast, and the breeze off the lake made it cooler than the 30C that the city was experiencing, we dabbled our feet in the water but found it too cool to tempt us to swim about. (Would have been quite refreshing had the sun been blazing and the day smokin' hot.) So we lay around on our towels on the beach and people watched, chatted and generally just relaxed the afternoon away.
Not two seconds on the beach and this appeared!
And she bit me.
Like this:
Nasty little bitch.... so I squished her dead... why, oh why, do I have to be at the top of mosquitodom's favourite flavour list????? ((sigh))
We enjoyed some cold soft drinks I had packed along; having stopped at Quizno's for a bite of lunch before leaving the city, we didn't pack any food.
During the afternoon, the clouds broke up and the sun came out, warming the beach considerably. We wandered over to the local snack shack for an ice cream cone. Melissa had Maple Walnut and I had Chocolate. Mmmmmmm
On the way back to the beach, the ice cream on my cone took a nose dive into the sand. I was horrified!
But I managed to rescue most of it, paring off the contaminated bits with paper napkins until clean ice cream was left. Which I then ate! (Yeah... whatever... five second rule and all that.) It was delicious and no, there were not sand bits in it.
We watched people playing frisbee.
We watched kids playing in the sand, building castles and whatever else their imaginations could come up with.
There were kids on boogie boards. (Lake Winnipeg actually has waves and tidal action, as it is large enough and shallow enough to be influenced by the moon, just like the oceans.)
We watched families interacting and enjoying each other's company.
We watched gulls and pelicans flying over and around the beach.
All in all, a lovely, relaxing Sunday afternoon. I hope everyone else out there had a great last day of August as well.
