stars

This was one of those days when I kept wishing I had my camera and then at the end I remembered that I have a camera on my phone that I use all the time (good grief), so I  snapped a few shots before the sun went down. Some of the photos are blurry, but they're better than nothing and simply describing it wouldn't do this beach justice.

His last day in Oman my dad wanted to go down to the beach and walk along the water at low tide. He and my mom had been a few days earlier and found a bunch of starfish. I was skeptical because I've lived here for 9 months and have never seen a starfish, but the beach here is beautiful, so off we went. My dad, ever the gamer, wanted everyone to place bets on how many starfish we'd find. I said, "zero" and my mom optimistically guessed, "15."

I guess it would be pretty ironic if I found the first starfish, huh? Good thing I love irony.

To say that we found some starfish would be an understatement. Lets just say that I stopped paying attention to the tally after we entered the 40s. I'm sure we were well over 100 by the time the boys quit.

They were all around this size or a little larger and they were all alive -- those little hairs on their underside were wiggling away. The boys got to use their starfish joke on Nana and Papa where they ask you to touch the center of of the starfish and then yell, "you just touched its butt!" (They learned that at the Monterey Aquarium.)

I don't know why I thought Camille would walk along the water like the rest of us. Instead she kept charging into the water. Josh ended up having to bring me a change of clothes for her when he came to meet us for dinner.

Racing down the beach -- Camille was left in the dust

Winter weekends at the beach are gorgeous. Omani families all come out and set up their charcoal grills, play soccer on the sand, and picnic all afternoon.

After we had our fill of starfish, we headed to this beachside restaurant for dinner (the site of the unfortunate corn-up-the-nose incident).