A Day at the Beach

Hello! Where I live, summer means days at the beach, weather and water temperature permitting. It's taken forever for the "Big Lake", as folks around here call it, to warm up, but finally it's beach time.

A visit to the beach has the usual shots:

Swimmers

 And boaters. But at this particular beach, we have to work at getting to and fro. You'll see what I mean in the remaining series of shots in this post!

 See all the steps leading back to the beach? This is after climbing only about a third of the way back to the parking lot.

This is about half of the way up.

A few more steps up...

The beach is looking rather distant at this point!

 At the top! There's some 250 steps to the top - and almost as many on the way down (thus, there's the same up and down coming to or leaving the beach). A huge sand dune, part of which has covered up some steps in the above photo, is the reason for the climb. 

It's worth the climb, though - in part because this is one of the least-crowded public beaches in the area. 

All in all, not a bad place to spend a hot summer day, especially since it's only about seven miles from where we live. But lest you envy me too much for living so close to a nice sandy beach, let me remind you that we pay for this proximity in the winter in the form of lake effect snowstorms that help to give us seasonal snowfall totals of 100" or more!