Bad luck with beaches

Svetlana and Annika at Brighton Beach

So, I am trying to catch up with all of the pictures of all of the fun things we did in July, and the next pictures were ones we took the day we tried to go to Brighton Beach, which is a part of Brooklyn where Russian immigrants live and there are a lot of Russian stores and restaurants. Our goal was to eat at a place called Cafe Glechik, but it was a pretty unsuccessful trip, so I decided not to blog about it. But after my trip to a beach in New Jersey yesterday, the one to Brighton Beach may not look so bad. So, as I mentioned we were actually planning on going to a restaurant, not the beach, but after driving around looking for a parking spot for a few hours, we decided to call and order take out from said restaurant and just jump out of the car to pick it up. The problem was that we went on a weekend in the middle of July when everyone and their Russian brother are going to the beach to actually lay out on the sand or swim or something, so there were absolutely not parking spaces available. We even tried near-by residential neighborhoods, but they had signs posted that you can't park there from May to September. If there is a warm day in September (maybe next year) we might try going back, because the food was definitely worth it (real shashliki if you know what I'm tlaking about). And I think it would be neat for Nikolay to be in an environment where everyone is speaking Russian. He is not to excited about that aspect of it, but I think after he experiences it he won't regret it. Kind of like when we first moved to Salt Lake, and I felt like he would enjoy going to the Russian branch, and he was really hesitant, but then after four years it was hard to convince him to switch to a local ward.
So the picture above is one we took when we were waiting for our food to be made, Nikolay let his mom and I out with the kids, and we walked down to the water, put our feet in for a few minutes and walked back across the hot sand trying not to step on the sunbathing, Russian speaking, lucky people who had successfully parked their cars somewhere, or maybe they came on the subway, which is what we probably should have done.
The part that I feel really bad about is that we had Jacob and Emily come to meet us there and we had to leave before they even got there. They had to spend an hour on the subway just to get there, but that by that time we had already been looking for a parking spot for two hours, and had lost moral and could not come up with a plan B. It was really very poor planning on my part. I guess I was just optimistic that something would work out. Which leads me to our adventure yesterday.
Maybe being optimistic, and not planning things out well, it a fault of mine....... maybe. For a while now Ariel has been asking if we could go to the beach sometime, and I told her that yes, we will go to the beach sometime this summer. Well, this week has been pretty boring for the kids, compared to the rest of the summer. Swimming is over, we are back from our family vacation, and my biggest accomplishments for Monday and Tuesday were getting our tires rotated and going to my first prenatal appointment (I'll blog more about that later.) Although those activities seemed to fill up my days the kids were a little on the bored side, so with nothing planned yesterday, I woke up thinking, "Today is a good day to take the kids to the beach. My neighbor, who grew up in New York, gave me the address of a nice beach that she has frequented since her childhood. I checked it out on line and checked the weather. It was a little overcast with a high of 80 degrees and it wasn't supposed to rain until 4:oo at which time it was only supposed to be 40% chance of rain, a risk I was willing to take. The only thought I had about the weather was that with the grey skies, the pictures wouldn't be that great. (How did I get away with spelling grey with an e today? Maybe little Miss Spellchecker is cosmically listening to me.)
Ariel and Adriana enjoying the waves in the rain.

Well, to make a long story short, we got to enjoy the beach for about seven minutes before a downpour had us running back to our car. At one point Ariel giggled and said,"This is the worst day of my life!" I thought. "Oh really, worse than being diagonosed with cancer? And you sure were having a lot of fun before I said we had to go back to the car beasue it was raining." She would have stayed out in the waves even if it were hailing. The kids all took all their clothes off in the car, I guess the prospect of driving back home for 2 hours in wet sandy clothes wasn't too appealing to them. Somehow everything we had managed to get wet and covered with sand. So in my quest to get older and wiser I have learned that next time I go to the beach I should pack dry towels and clothes that stay in the car. I couldn't very well drive around naked, so I was stuck in my wet clothes. For some reason we were all starving at this point, and in my condition I can't stand hunger very long without getting a little crazy. So we were driving around looking for a drive through, and I had thoughts like, "I hope we can find an interesting drive through not the typical fast food, like Greek food or "Curry in a Hurry" in Salt Lake. Better yet, I wish they had drive throughs that sold dry clothes, at least t-shirts, and underwear would be nice too." Well, no such luck, there wasn't even a McDonald's. Then I spotted a pizza place in a strip mall. I decided to run in and get some pizza for everyone while the semi-naked kids waited in the car, and hoped I wouldn't get arrested for that. I tried to brush as much sand off of me as possible, but was somewhat embarrassed to enter a restaurant dripping wet. The nice thing about living in the East is that there are real actual Italian people who run pizza places and call deep dish pizza "Sicilian." The nice thing about having an eight year old daughter is that when I got back to the car, she had everyone mostly dressed, having located somewhat dry clothes and shaken off the sand from most of them.
As we drove away from the strip of land that the beach was located on, we spotted a castle on a hill, and decided to drive up the hill to explore. It turns out that the castle was actually a historic site, of two old lighthouses connected by a fortress looking building, now turned into a museum. We got to see a giant bivalve lens, that the girls called a disco ball, becasue it was so shiney. The towers are actually the Twin Lights of Navesink.
The kids really enjoyed the museum there and climbing one of the towers.
Annika ended up wearing Dallin's swimsuit and rash guard because hers was too wet and we lost her skirt at the beach. Climbing up the tower. This is a view from the tower. You can see the new bridge they are building that take you out to the beaches, Sea Bright, the beach we went to is off to the right.

On the way out of town we followed some more little brown signs to find a scenic overlook with a playground called Mitchell Scenic Overlook, where on a clear day you can see all the way to NYC. Too bad it wasn't a clear day, but we had fun anyway getting wet all over again on the playground. Everyone agreed that we had a fun day despite the rain.
Adriana really wanted her picture sitting on this "gun" it was actually a cannon, but I guess that is not in my kids' vocabulary.