Glass Beach

This activity was probably the low point for me. Not so much for Jeff. Glass Beach is just that, a beach of glass. Millions of tiny pieces of glass speckle the sand. It's on the south side of the island so we stopped by before our heli ride to try and get more out of the long drive. There were a few other cars when we pulled up but nothing like the other beaches. Glass beach is not for swimming, or breathing. It stunk so bad, like a dump. Which it is. Jeff didn't care and got right down to the business of looking for sea glass.

There aren't many pieces of smooth, tumbled, sea glass; just broken glass. I walked around a little, picked up a few of the bigger pieces I could find (big meaning the size of a small shirt button) and walked back to the car to wait for Jeff to finish. 

After 10 minutes I moved the car to a shaded spot, rolled down the windows (the farther you got from the beach entrance the less you could smell the nasty dump smell), and took a nap. For an hour. It turns out I should have taken the car a little further up the dirt road for a coastline view and an untended Chinese graveyard. This is a close-up of the "sand". Those are pieces of un-tumbled glass. It hurt like hell on my feet. It was hot and sharp.

Jeff finally returned completely soaked with pockets full of "finds".

Mostly broken glass, not sea glass. He did bring a change of clothes which was smart thinking because no one would have gotten in that tiny helicopter with him smelling like that beach. The night before our flight back home I did a final load of laundry. His soaked glass beach clothing was nowhere to be found and he thought maybe he left it at the helicopter office. The next morning I woke up knowing where his clothes were. We had a pile of used beach towels in the foyer of the condo. I rummaged through the pile and sure enough his clothes from that day rolled out. They smelled like death and we didn't have time to run another load in the washer and dryer. I hand washed them with some liquid detergent in the bathroom sink and threw them in the dryer. The hand-washing didn't help the smell. It was that bad.