Friday, September 15, 2006

Beach Weather

I grudgingly went back to work this week, lamenting all the way my loss of valuable knitting time. Though I snuck in rows during lunch hours and evenings, I set my sights on today, because (lucky me) I'm only working 4 days a week and Fridays seem like they're going to be made for knitting. But around mid-day Wednesday the weather changed. The clouds parted, the sun shone, and the rain ceased to fall. AND this glorious weather is still going strong.

Just to put this all in perspective let me tell you that Juneau set wet-weather records this summer. In August alone there were 29 days with measurable precipitation. In the period from April to the end of August something like 109 out of 153 days were rainy days. These current days of sun are especially precious because we've seen so few of them, and as autumn approaches we can expect to see even fewer.

In light of all this, I did the only thing a sane person could do today. I went to the beach. I took my husband, our dog and my knitting with me. We saw the boys off to school("Bye-bye suckers kids, have a nice day!"), packed up lunches and the dog, and headed out the road to the Boy Scout Camp. It's a short hike through the woods to the camp and a beautiful crescent-shaped beach with views of the Chilkats. We saw sea lions from the beach, some sort of falcon that flew overhead, and three bikini-clad sun-bathers. (Only in Juneau is 60 degrees bikini weather.) We almost saw a bear, but some other hikers came upon it first and their dogs scared it off.

We had lunch on the beach and basked in the sun while I snuck in a few more rows on the back of my Noro vest...







5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gawd! What a pic! What a beach!!!! You know, I'm a bit relieved to hear that it wasn't only in Austria that we set records for the coldest, wettest and most horrible August in centuries, argh! Our September sure made up for it though, today is the first day it's raining a bit, before we had temperatures high up in the 90's, yay! Unfortunately we don't have such a super-cool beach closeby like you have - may I say I'm a bit jealous? Fingers crossed that there'll be a couple more days for you to go there and relax!

Abigail said...

So jealous. I am living in Arizona. All we have is scraggly bushes and trees. So beyond land locked.

Thank you so much for sharing these pics. As a prior Navy sailor it is so good to see water. I've always wanted to go to Alaska, now I want to go even more...sigh.

Keep those pretty pics coming:D

Hilary said...

What, you didn't take the kids!?! Kidding. Glad you got some sun. It has been summerlike here lately, but that is supposed to change soon. Your vest looks very organic lying there on the beach! It's going to be beautiful.

Dropstitchknitter said...

Exactly what I would have done! What a beautiful view! We've had record rains here too, on the east coast and it makes me wonder how many snowstorms we'll get this winter - good luck with the TKGA entries!!!!

Anonymous said...

Ohhh, I feel homesick now. I spent a great deal of time out there, it used to be called Camp Runamuck and I was a High School Camp Counselor in a program for Sixth Graders. A few years ago I took the ferry from Haines to Juneau and had tear in my eyes it was so beautiful. Thank you for sharing pics, is it still called Eagle Beach?