Our family likes to visit the ocean in January every year. You can get some absolutely beautiful days on the Oregon coast in the wintertime, which surprised me when I first learned of that. We only live about twenty minutes from the coast and you’d think we would get there all the time, but we don’t. I told Jeff once that we needed to go to the ocean once a month, that it was a must, essential. It was so close by and so regenerating and healing for us to go there, that it seemed like monthly visits were just a given. He agreed and liked that idea too, but we never followed through with that plan. Life happens, we get busy, you know how it goes… so when we do go to the ocean it makes us appreciate and savor our time there all the more.

Bracken got very interested in fossils recently when we read a chapter book where the characters discovered some. He also got very interested in dinosaurs. Jeff got Bracken a kit where you excavate small dinosaur bones from clay and then put the dinosaur figurine together when you’ve found all the pieces. They’ve had fun doing that together. Years ago Jeff and I found fossils at Beverly Beach, just north of Newport, in Oregon. We thought Bracken would love that and he had been begging for his dad to bring him to the aquarium in Newport, so we told him that we’d take a day up the coast after the holidays. Then we watched the weather forecast.

On Friday we took off on our adventure. Gratefully, it was sunny and bright while we were at the beach and the clouds didn’t come until later in the afternoon. We had fun hunting for fossils at Beverly Beach. We didn’t find nearly the amount of fossils that Jeff and I had found on our first trip there like I was hoping we would (there were some amazing finds on that first trip!), but Bracken was excited with everything we found. (I should add that we only took some rocks that we found on the ground. If you plan to go to Beverly Beach, they don’t allow anyone to take anything from the cliff sides.) Jeff found a fossilized snail shell and Bracken found a fossilized shell. I found an amazing little pebble with a natural hole all the way through. We saw lots of rocks with shell fossils in them (mostly huge), and brought a few small ones home. We found other cool rocks too. Jeff found a rock with crystals and we all found beautiful agates. I’d say Bracken’s only disappointment was that he didn’t find any dinosaur bones.

We’re a family that has always enjoyed looking for rocks and I was wondering if any of you have any favorite rock hunting places? If so, please share! We’d love to explore some new places for our next rock hunting adventure.

P.S. Bracken’s interests grow by the day. He heard a story about the Loch Ness Monster (who he thinks could be the last dinosaur) and asked us to write a letter asking Nessie to please come live in the river by our house. He asked us the best way to deliver the message and Jeff had the idea to make it a message in a bottle. They threw it into the ocean on our fossil hunting day and Bracken hoped it would make it’s way to Nessie. Though after they threw it, he told me he kind of wanted the bottle back and hoped we would find it the next time we went to the beach…