John ran in the Newport 1/2 Marathon the last weekend of May.  He has done the full marathon a few times, but this time decided to try the half.I think he said it was the first time they had a 1/2.  Anyway, he was first in his age division and 11th overall.  I have been going to his races since he was in grade school.  You never stop wanting to be a part of your kids activities.

I saw a sight on the beach that I have never seen before.  Up on higher ground away from the water line were all these formations.  At first I thought I was seeing sandcastles left behind by some kids, but as I got closer I realized they were sand formations.  There were thousands of them!  It went on and on...first rows of these, then dunes of sand, then more of these.  From what I could figure out, it is from the wind drying out the sand from the winter storms.  I would guess that the sand was pretty wet, then with all the wind we get at the beach and it beginning to dry, the dry sand is being blow against the wet sand leaving these behind.  It was pretty amazing.  As you can imagine, I took a ton of photos, I put my favorites here.

 If we go to Newport, we always make sure to include a trip to the lighthouse and then on down the trail to the tide pools. 

  This time we got to see seals swimming and found a nest on the ground with eggs in it.  The eggs are from the black birds called Common Murre.  They had hundreds of nests out in the ocean on a rock, but there are also some nests on the cliffs behind the tidepools,  this one must have fallen from a cliff .

I read that this is one of the largest colonies of Common Murr on the coast.

The ones that look like penguins are the Common Murr.  The ones with blue on their neck are Brant's Comorants.  They only have the blue when they are nesting. There was a woman there with a really powerful telescope that let us see them really close.  I was pretty happy when I got home and put my photos on the computer and was able to see that blue show up.  You could not see it by just standing and looking out there.

 There was Peregrine Falcon nest.  One of them kept flying out of the nest and resting on some rocks, then flying back, so I was able to get a fair shot of it.  The nest was pretty far away, so I didn't really get to see much going on there.