fenchurch | 28 April - 25th Anniversary!

So, this is going to be more than just one photo... we had a wonderful day out on the coast and I took a lot of pictures! I'd hoped to be able to post some of our wedding photos in honor of the day... but I really don't have very many of them scanned in yet, so I suspect it may happen sometime this summer instead.

As I've mentioned, we decided to head out to our favorite spot on the Washington coast for our anniversary this year and I took a ton of photos including overly friendly seagulls, the best soup in the world (completely unrelated to the aforementioned seagulls), some adorable baby goats, a visit to Waikiki Beach (yes, really!) and a bit of kite-flying...

First up, within an hour of our arrival the day before, we pretty much had at least one seagull sitting on the railing of our balcony watching us constantly during daylight hours. For awhile, we thought it might be the same seagull (because, really, how do you tell them apart?), but figured out quickly that they were on some sort of rotation. I somehow managed to catch these two posed quite nicely and not attacking each other.

After breakfast (delivered to our room... our hotel is technically a B&B with a picnic breakfast), we headed north up the Long Beach Peninsula to my favorite little family goat dairy. They even had my favorite of their cheeses, the goat Monterey Jack (which tastes nothing like regular Monterey Jack, but has almost the exact same flavor and texture as one of my other favorites, Wensleydale). After picking out some cheeses, the farmer asked if we wanted to see the kids... and they were adorable! There were about 15 of them, apparently with four more on the way. They were super friendly and so excited to see people. I snapped this photo with

rackham's phone, because I'd left both my phone and camera in the car.

Next up was lunch at our favorite restaurant, 42nd Street Cafe, where we both had their yummy tuna salad sandwich (made with locally caught and canned tuna) and, best of all, the Brandied Tomato and Blue Cheese Soup. Seriously, sooooo good. I used to eat that stuff even back before I discovered my Magic Pills and I would just suffer through a reaction to all that cow's milk. Because I gotta tell you... it was completely worth it. Much better these days, though, when I can pop LactAid throughout the meal and not have to worry about my sinuses and lungs exploding later. I would love to learn how to make that soup, myself, though... and see if I can do it without the cow's milk.

Then we continued down south to visit some of the State Parks there and do some hiking and Geocaching... which is where we stumbled across Waikiki Beach! I can't even tell you how many years we've been coming out to this area on vacation and for some reason we'd never run across it before! I managed to figure out how to work the timer function on my camera, but I still only just barely made it over to the sign before it clicked.

And here's a photo of the actual Waikiki Beach. Not exactly the sort of place you'd want to go swimming... although there was a guy getting into what appeared to be a drysuit while we were there, so there may be halfway decent surfing of some sort. The lighthouse in the distance is the one at Cape Disappointment (we've been there many times, which is why I'm so surprised we'd never been to this beach before). We could actually see the light from this one in the distance from our hotel room.

And then we finally remembered to break out the kites... although the wind was surprisingly mild. Mostly this meant that Rackham's kite flew perfectly and mine would pretty much only stay in the air if I kept moving. Here's Rackham helping me get mine up the air again.