Beach Yoga and Scrabble

On Monday, we added another element to our morning routine at the beach - yoga.  After the hike from the parking lot across Big Beach, then across Little Beach, we set up our stuff, then go down to our "studio," pictured below, to spend 10 minutes or so doing various yoga poses.  So far, we have done Mountain, Half-Moon, Downward Facing Dog, Forward Bend, Left and Right Bend and Triangle.

Half-Moon Pose, with iPhone-in-Hand variation

Mark has done a lot of yoga in the past.  The first time I did yoga was last summer when I was visiting my daughter Hannah up in Vancouver.  She took me along to one of her classes at the West Vancouver Rec Centre, and I'm glad the teacher went easy on me.  After doing and holding various poses for 30 minutes, I was beginning to wonder whether I could make it to the end of the class.  Until doing it myself, I had no idea how rigorous yoga is.

Prior to our trip, we took advantage of a groupon for yoga classes in Salt Lake City, and I look forward to these upon our return.  

At the other end of the day, toward late afternoon around cocktail time, we sometimes play Scrabble Scramble - a travel version of the game that is played on a small vinyl "board" with the following major variation from the standard version:  after the second player makes a word using the first player's initial word, the letters of the initial word not used by the second player (to form his word) are removed from the board.

We spread out the "board" on my Kindle

And use Mark's iPad to throw the dice

Although, in a pinch, we just use the sand

The game comes with an hour-glass timer, which we initially used.  But we found using the timer too constrictive:  it required too much focus on the game, when we'd rather look around the beach or out onto the water and nurse our cocktails while playing.  It also made the game more competitive than we would like; so we decided to ditch the timer.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of this word combination.

The night before last was so beautiful and peaceful.