quiet, soothing, beach?

Finally summer has arrived. It has been in the 90's the past week. I love it! We have been wanting to check out the beach since we moved here so on Sunday we decided to check it out after church. The Long Island Sound is about 35 minutes from our church so we packed our swimsuits and a picnic lunch to enjoy later that day. Now I'm not sure what you think of when you picture the beach, but going to the beach for us involves lots of spacious beach with plenty of room to play paddle ball on the sand and lots of water to dive in and throw a football around in. I also like to lay out in the sun, feeling my skin tingle from the suns rays. It's peaceful and calm and very soothing. Unfortunately, the "beaches" out here are QUITE different. Grant it, this really was the first nice weekend we've had so I'm sure there were even more people out there but still. It was wicked (I'm working on my East Coast talk) crowded! I'm talking blanket to blanket crowded. When I go to the beach, I don't want anyone within 10+ feet of me but here there was barely any room to walk between the beach towels. There was no room for paddle ball, no room for sandcastle building. :-( We looked out into the water and there was a sea of people standing, just standing. No splashing, no jumping in the waves (there weren't any really), no playing catch with a nerf football. We wondered why? Apparently that's the rules. You can't throw stuff in the water or even bring a raft into the water. I don't get it. And to make everything worse, the park was full so we had to park down the street and walk in. What we didn't realize was that it was probably a 35 minute walk just to get to the water. So we walked 35 minutes to the water, ate our lunch next to the hundreds of other people, stood in the water and then walked 35 minutes back to the car. It was not the ideal day at the beach to say the least. My pictures don't do it justice but here are a few pictures I took right before we left. There were a few open spots since some people had just left but earlier in the day, there wasn't any room.On the bright side, we found this fun ice cream shoppe on the way home and stopped to get some ice cream that was really yummy. Kyle got raspberry crunch and I got cherry chocolate chip. While the beach wasn't what we expected, this ice cream shoppe helped brighten our bust of a day!