Thursday, January 26, 2012

Celebrating the New Year...Long Beach style!

We wanted to do something cool for our first married New Year's together, and we had two ideas, and two days off. Idea number one is that there's a bike trail from right by our house down to the ocean. We'd been wanting to do this for-e-ver, and finally had both bikes fixed enough that we could. Idea number two was that our friend Ernie lent us another full wet suit and some flippers, so we wanted to go snorkeling down at Laguna Beach again. Luckily Miles had me check the weather before we made our final plans. New Year's eve was set for the 70s, and the 2nd was listed for kind of sunny and ... 83+ degrees! Done and done!
The bike ride on New Year's Eve was super fun, and it took us down clear to Seal Beach...you know that pier that we've taken you all to when you came to visit? Yep. Rode there on our Huffys. We saw some crazy stuff on the way; weird pollution bubbles, weird pollution snails, burned palm tree trunks, and a whole bunch of snowy egrets and blue herons. I think Miles has all those pictures on his phone, though. Oh, well. It was a blast, and we figured out afterwards that we rode about 20 miles. Poor Miles had the hard seat most of the way, but we compensated for that by tying my jacket all around it to make it comfier.
Being the huge partiers we are, we rang in the New Year by going to bed at nine thirty and setting the alarm for midnight, at which point I woke up, cheered, and peeked through the blinds at our neighbors fireworks, and Miles made some grunting sounds from his side of the bed. :) YAY 2012!!! Really, we DO get excited for the new year, and we celebrated a little more after church with some homemade "Martinelli's" (Walmart juice + lemon-lime soda-yummier!).
Anyway, THEN came the really exciting part. On Jan 2nd, we drove down to Laguna Beach. The rest of the story is better told by pictures, and I've already written a lot, so I'll just put some little captions and let you look! Sorry about the strange lighting in a lot of them...our camera decided to change the settings for itself, and we didn't figure out what was going on until afterwards. It is especially a bummer in the video, but you can still kind of see what's going on. :)

We got the same sweet parking spot as last time...right behind us are the stairs down to the beach.

Remember those stairs I told you about? Here they are! It's this little "secret" cove called Shaw's Cove.
But you know how we are about finding secret places. Everyone else seems to find them, too.

Little would you know--right under the water are tons and tons of sea urchins! This was their actual color.

Oh, did I mention that it was FREEZING? We almost got out twice as soon as we got in, but then we got excited and stuck it out for about a half hour. It was so cold that the water gave you a head freeze when you went under!

Miles is an awesome diver. I usually just chill out on the surface. Less ear-popping that way!

Right in front of us! Miles chased them, but of course we couldn't get close enough to touch them
We finished up right as the sun started to set.
Boy did we luck out on times and temperatures!




Man, it was so much fun! Just writing about it makes me want the water to get warmer so we can dare to go again! We took a few videos, but between the strange light on our camera and our shaky hands from being cold, this (below) is the one I thought would be the most fun to watch. The color is pretty crazy and neon for most of it, but you can see the sea urchins, a few cool fish, and a star fish that we saw.

Happy New Year!