The Lilly Family: Beach Trip

This is my beach, the sand and gulf that I grew up on in the summers and look forward to watching my children grow up on. It's a beautiful place, so peaceful and relaxing. It's so hard for me to watch and believe what is happening to our gulf and our beaches. We just returned from enjoying some more time at the beach and were fortunate that things really have not gotten bad in our area of Perdido Key. That's not to say we never saw any oil in the water or on the beach, but it's just not as bad as it could be and is further down the road. I think the most disturbing thing to me was the absence of the normal beach wildlife we always see. There were very few pelicans flying around, we never saw the group of dolphins that swim right out in front of us, we saw very few fish and the cranes that were always hanging out along the shore were not to be found. To say the least, it was eerie and it was sad and just keeps you thinking that they are seeking healthier waters. It's hard to imagine what is in store for our gulf and that the future of it will be completely different from what we have all known.

Luckily, for us, there are hundreds (probably thousands) of people organized in helping clean up our beaches. This guy and several others rode up and down the beach all day looking at the shoreline and looking out in the gulf for signs of anything that needed to be cleaned up.

We did see some signs of the oil in the water and on the beach. This was probably the biggest ball we saw.

The people cleaning up anything that washed ashore were stationed EVERYWHERE! You could see white tents up and down each way of the beach. They worked hard raking and shoveling anything that resembled oil and did a great job.

Of course we saw sea gulls....little vultures. I was able to get this picture of them lined up only because they seemed to love my sweet baby Carson, whom I must say is rarely without a snack. They followed her around like our dogs does at home. I think she gave in and just tossed a whole bag of chips in the sand and ran. If you look closely, you can see one of them with a cheese puff in there mouth!

Lucky for us, the water was deemed safe and we took advantage of that. Like I said, we did see some small things in the water, mostly just things that looked like flakes with a burnt orange color. We avoided it and kept up our fun times.