At the beach in February

Even some of my Spanish high school students have stopped to ask me about the crazy weather that is happening in a lot of places in the US this winter. Mom and Dad have not been enthusiastic about how often they are shoveling the driveway these days. However, here in Huelva, the winter has been extremely mild (at least for my standards). Of course no snow. It has been off-and-on overcast/rainy and clear skies. We had a few cold weeks in the fall in which our non-heated apartment was pretty nippy. That being said, save for a few isolated cold nights, it hasn't been bad at all this winter, I rarely feel really cold. At night it drops to low forties and in the day it gets into the high sixties sometimes (even into the seventies this week!) Needless to say, it has been a pretty good contrast from what's going on in the US--at least from my side of the globe. This is a picture I took from our balcony on a particularly clear day.

Anyways, the weather was nice enough that some friends and I could enjoy the beach while wearing a few layers. We packed up a picnic lunch and headed off to a secluded area of the beach on a February Sunday. To get to this section of the beach you have to walk on a boarded sidewalk that winds through a sandy woody area and then the dunes. It was beautiful. 

We had a lovely time lounging and drinking wine on the beach until the wind became cold enough that we retreated to a more sheltered spot in the dunes. I actually liked this best--we still got to hear the constant pulse of the crashing waves and feel the sun but we were tucked into the dunes. Dunes are really cool places. Limbos between land and sea. Though it was only a silly little excursion with friends, I had a faint feeling of being somewhere exotic and uncharted. No one was about and we stayed chatting, sipping on wine and relaxing until after the sunset.