So Friday Doug mentions he thought maybe we could go to the beach on Saturday. My mind starts whirling. “Well, we’ll need to buy a cooler (our old one had developed a leak and didn’t make the move with us), we’ll need drinks to go in the cooler, and ice, we don’t have any sunscreen, I’ll need snacks because I don’t want to buy food there, and oh, yeah, I DO know where all the beach towels are! But what about swim trunks?” Nothing is easy when you’ve got kids to tag along with you.
We spent what felt like half the day just getting ready. Buying a cooler and sunscreen (and a map of Northern Italy), buying drinks and snacks, forgetting to buy ice and having to go over to the shopette, then trying to figure out what beach to go to, and then getting the GPS all set up. I don’t think we left the base till almost 2 p.m.
We headed towards Lignano. The kids and I went to the zoo there a couple weeks ago. One of the other moms that was on that trip mentioned that last summer they would go to the beach in Lignano every Sunday after church. Sounded good to me! It was a pleasant drive, though the autostrada can be kinda scary. Two lanes each way and you have people in the slow lane sometimes as slow as 45 mph and in the fast lane you have people whizzing by at twice that! Makes passing scary because you can look and no one is there and then pull out only to find someone on your bumper. It cost Euro 1.40 to use the autostrada. One of these days we’ll get a Telepass so we can just zip on through and get billed once every 3 months.
We got to the beach and had to drive around for a bit to find a parking space (which we added to the GPS “favorites” file lol). The parking reminded me of going to the beach in Southern California. The beach itself was actually on the other side of a wall. There are shops and caffe bars along the wall, along with bathrooms/showers. It was kind of strange to me, because you couldn’t see what the beach looked like or how crowded it might be till after you committed yourself to being there! But it wasn’t crowded really, and the water was so pretty. There were umbrellas you could rent, along with chairs and lounges. And some guy, who did NOT look Italian, tried to sell us beach towels. Another guy was selling what looked like large sections of raw coconut, but I’m not certain because I didn’t have my handy English/Italian dictionary to look up the Italian word for coconut. If you don’t want to pay to rent an umbrella, you just set your stuff up on the beach. Oddly enough, the “free” beach area is the closest to the water! That is what I want so I can watch the kids!
The kids had a blast, digging in the wet sand and catching crabs and hermit crabs. The water was on the cold side, not many people were swimming. But there were people playing games of soccer on the beach, and a few couples hitting a volley ball back and forth. There were only a few topless ladies, I don’t think the kids even noticed. They did notice a lot of the girls about their ages didn’t have tops and they thought that was strange. We explained it’s just a cultural difference and not a big deal. So they went back to catching crabs and finding shells.
The water was calm, the breeze was blowing, the sun was warm, all in all a relaxing time. I try to forget how much I dislike sand and sandy children, who somehow seem to cover EVERYTHING in sand that is within 3 feet of their person.
I don’t know how it is at your place, but you know it is summer in the Springer household when there are three little white butts attached to otherwise brown bodies, We are on our way!
Bene, MaMa! 