Yesterday we packed a picnic dinner in a cooler and headed down to the beach to stake out a fire pit. Little did we know everyone was staking out a fire pit on a Monday night. Monday? Really? Here I thought I was being proactive and heading out at 5:30 when my ideal photo-taking time in my head was actually 7:15 (the magical glow light hour).

Sure enough, the beach was crowded and every single fire pit was taken. Everyone and their cousin was at the beach on a Monday night because it’s summer and everyone is on vacation!

Except me. I was going to the beach to take photos for a job.

So I did the next best thing: I went fire pit to fire pit asking everyone politely if we could just “borrow” their fire pit for half an hour. Amazingly the first fire pit I walked up to said yes! Payam got a fire going in minutes and I snapped away for my shoot. The girls posed. We ate hot dogs and marshmallows and then we hustled out of there.

Sadly, in my haste to not overstay our welcome at the borrowed fire pit, I kind of missed my ideal photo-taking light by an hour or two.

It’s okay. I didn’t get the *magical shot* I had my heart set on but I got several “good enough” shots.  And as a bonus I got the whole family out of the house and outdoors to the beach for some good old-fashioned FREE entertainment.

You’d think that since we only live 15 minutes from a beautiful beach we would be down here all the time. I hang my head in shame. We hardly go at all. Maybe once a month if we remember. I think because we live so close to it, we never think to “make a day of it,” We just go for a quick hour here or there, which isn’t really doing the beach right. To really enjoy it you do have to go early, camp out and stay long. I think as locals we kind of miss out on that and it’s a shame.

So yesterday, even though it was for a job, was a small stab at getting it right. We didn’t camp out and stay all day (which would have been a good idea for staking out a fire pit and getting my *magical shot*) but we did stay late. We sat on the sand and watched the sun set until it changed the whole sky into an ombre layered dessert of pastels. It was so beautiful and best of all it was FREE!

We looked around at all the visiting families laughing, snacking, swimming, playing tag football…and realized how incredibly smart they were. They got it right.

Now if I can just get off the couch more often and get it right too!