Playa Del Rey: "Beach of the Kings"

I think Lauren is going to post a longer post about what we've been up to these past two weeks, but I wanted to write a little bit about the beach wehere we are.


The condo we're staying at here is almost right on "Play del Rey" which translates to Beach of the Kings or King's Beach.  Here's a picture of the beach.

It looks about like a beach in South Carolina, but with one difference--there's about 3 times as much sand. The sand in the above picture is about a third of the total beach, I'll have to take a picture of the whole beach soon. Also, where we are, the tide changes the waterline about a foot or two, there's not a massive tide.

The sand looks different than our beaches at home--it's much coarser and has multiple colors in it.

Its also hard to walk in.

Almost everywhere near the waterline are pieces of washed up kelp.

It looks like this undewater:

(not my picture)

And it looks like this here:

like little brown carrots

There are also patches of broken shell fragments:

Usually the waves here aren't too big, probably about a foot or two tall

Last week, however, because of some special weather conditions, the waves were towering above my height. It was hard to take a picture of them because I didn't have anything for scale. Here's a picture from the top balcony of our condo. Notice the little people in the corner.

These waves were absolutely huge! Lauren and I went down to the beach one night while the waves were so big and a guy told us that twice a year the waves come all the way up to the bike path. We never saw the water that high, but a few days you could see the high tide line way up the beach. The bike path had been covered in sand in some places (by the previous nights' waves). The bike path, is about 500ft from the waterline usually.

Here's some more pictures of giant waves that have nothing for scale:

And that's the beach here.