A very zen tide pool experience

Tide pool, tide pools,tide pools I am sure you are so sick of hearing about tide pools. If you will indulge me one last time I promise I won't talk about them for a while.

This trip I was still feeling like perhaps this would be one of the last times I would see the things about Los Angeles that I love. With a heavy heart I rode to Doheny State Beach, which is about an hour and a half south. Coincidentally the very first time I visited LA we headed down to Doheny to escape the city and it was there I almost drowned. So I thought that maybe things had come full circle.

I digress.

If you look at the website for the tide pools at Doheny you will get a list of what you can find there. What I keep finding after all of the tide pools I visit, even though some of them are only 10 miles from each other they are very different eco-systems, with very different marine life. Sometimes you do not have to look hard to see Sea Stars, muscles, etc, but other places, like at Doheny, you really have to stare hard into the water, relax, breathe and wait for movement. Sometimes this can be a very zen experience.

If you waited long enough you saw hermit crabs catch the racing shrimp-like mini crustaceans, the crabs battling snails for their shells, and other tiny cool things that if you were impatient and stressed you wouldn't have even noticed.

(this little tiny pink thing is a sea cucumber)

If you check my friends blog you will see me balance gracefully from rock to rock in a skirt and all of the scientific names of what we saw.



My new camera is great at catching things that my old camera couldn't, like this sea hare. Unfortunately for one of these creatures a family came across one and thought it would be cool to pick one up, throw it and watch its purplish blood spatter across the rocks.

The most fun at this tide pool is picking up large dry rocks and watching the crabs skitter away from you. What we saw can also be seen in the post in my friends blog.

So, no more tide pools for this blog, but next is the Monarch butterfly migration, which I hear is spectacular.