Summer's Beginnings

Summer seemed to creep up gradually.  It seemed like one day I was still wearing my heavy jacket and jeans complaining about the fog, rain and cold and than one day, all of a sudden, the layers came off, I got a sunburn, the water warmed up, the lifeguards showed up at the beach and it was officially summer!

One of the first real summer things I do every July is head out to Rendell's Farm in Bras d'Or and pick enough fresh strawberries to last the winter.  This year the strawberries weren't as good as they usually were and my schedule didn't work out very well with the sunny days (it rained every weekend at the start of summer) so I only got half of what I usually pick.  As I write this, they are almost gone already!

It seems the jellyfish don't stick around as much as they used to and by the second week in July, they were all gone!  The water was a little late warming up but it was still tolerable in the early days of summer.  Any nice day when I wasn't out of town, I was on Dominion Beach in the afternoons and again in the evenings for a walk and sunset viewing.  Oh and there were some endangered piping plovers nesting on the beach too.  That added some excitement especially after the little ones hatched.  There were also three baby eagles born in the nest alongside the road I drive on to get to the beach so that made my drive a little more enjoyable!  I even saw a baby bobcat in Lingan on my way home from the beach one evening but that was a one time thing.  Elusive as they are, I've only seen maybe three bobcats in my whole life. 

Something that was missing at the beach this summer was fox kittens. There were none.  Several adult foxes were hanging around the beach all summer, but no little ones were born.  

Most mornings before heading to the beach, I'd drive to Dad's and go biking along the shore to the lighthouse.  That was sometimes followed by a visit to my sisters to see her and my little nephew or we would meet them at the beach so he could play in the sand and out his feet in the water. 

 As summer went on, the days got hotter and, unfortunately for me, my air conditioning broke in my car.  Of course, right in the middle of summer!  After a hard time trying to get someone to fox it and honor the warranty, it was back up and running but I was having to roll down the windows and sweat out any long drives for almost a month. 

Those hot days lingered and there were no more rainy weekends come late July.  As good as this sounds, it wasn't good for our forests.  Huge fires broke out elsewhere in the province and there was a high risk of one starting here so the province shut down the woods.  No fires, no hiking, no doing anything if it involved walking through any woods.  That smoke from the wildfires up the line drifted this way a few times and one evening, I captured the perfect sunset behind a haze.   

 Despite that woods ban, I made the best of summer and it turned out to be another amazing one filled with memories and adventures. A long drive to along the coast to Main-a-Dieu and through Louisbourg, sunsets, meteor showers, beach walks, ocean swims....and that's just the beginning of it all!