A Day at the Seaside

Yesterday as the weather was still glorious we decided to make the most of it and take the boys to the beach.  As Brighton has a pebble beach we thought it would be nicer to drive along the coast to West Wittering where there is a beautiful sandy beach.  It was quite a long drive in the end as clearly quite a few people had had the same idea but it was worth the wait as it was such a lovely sunny day.

When we arrived we decided to picnic by the car rather than carry the cool bag down onto the beach.  You wouldn't think you would need that much for a trip to the beach would you?

Well we had three beach chairs, a pop up tent, a skim board, a kite, two frisbees, two buckets, a spade, a rake and a giant spade, other sand castle building implements, five towels, a ground sheet, change of clothes for Nat, spare swim nappies and baby wipes, books, sunglasses, suncream, camera, drinks etc (as you can imagine we were quite laden down without the cool bag as well) 

Of course we arrived while the tide was out and plonked ourselves right at the front of the beach near the waters edge so every hour we had to decamp a little further back as the tide caught up with us.

Nathaniel had a great time building sandcastles and was particular enchanted with some little flags that my Dad had given him to put on the top of his sand castles, from all different countries.  He spent a long time carefully inserting flags into each sandcastle but not wanting the effort of having to build a castle for each flag he ingeniously came up with the idea of sticking more than one flag in each castle. 

I found it quite hard to overcome my OCD tendancies and had to stop myself from replacing each flag in the centre of each sandcastle when I observed Nat sticking them in at the edge!

While the day was beautifully warm the sea was still quite chilly but I was not deterred and went right in.  It was not quite like being in Spain though as although I sumerged myself up to my neck I was gasping from the cold and I could not just lie back and float like you can when you are in Costa Blanca.  Meanwhile Nat thought it was highly amusing to be buried in the sand by Seb.

It was a very relaxing day though, Seb and I both read for a little while David took Nat for a walk along the beach.  Then Nat and I splashed in the sea while David and Seb went to get us all icecreams.

 









When we finally packed up the car we drove the short distance to East Wittering where we purchased Fish and Chips and went down to the beach to eat them before driving home.

 

It is always a shame that a lovely day out inevitably ends with the arduous task of unloading the car and unpacking everything but so far it has been a very enjoyable and memorable weekend and Nat should sleep really well tonight!