AUTUMN ON THE SOLITARY BEACH

I had to do some work in the city today, very early in the morning, so...

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...so I took the opportunity to spend some time in a place on the outskirts of the city, later in the morning. It was a litlle past ten AM...

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...when I arrived at the beach shown in this photograph. This inlet on the attractive stretch of coastline on the Verudela peninsula is colloquially known as Ambrela Beach becouse of the nearby Lounge Bar Ambrela.
It is one of those places, and by that I mean both the beach and the bar, that's teeming with tourists and locals in summer, but on an autumn morning, you can find there the serene calm of some remote stretch of coastline far from any city.
I already told you the name of the part of the city where today's post is set, so you may now ask yourself: But wait, what city is he talking about here? Well, I'll tell you the name of the city at the end, so if you happen to be Romanian or know that language, you won't laugh until the final sentence of the post. I want this to be a serious post...until the very end. And then the end- well, the end is another story.

One of the first things I did upon arrival was scan the horizon. I love watching the horizon when I'm by the sea; that's how I noticed the distant sailing boat shown in this photograph.

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Here you see the same distant sailing boat next to an even more distant white boat with no sails. Becouse of the mirage, the distant scene looks almost like a painting. In the following photograph...

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...you can see something I found on the ground right in front of my feet. It's a tiny sea snail. I used the macro lens to make it look this big. The scientific name of the species is Muricopsis cristata.

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Here you can see the snail using its single muscular foot to move across the wet pebble in the intertidal zone.

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Here you can see three cypresses that grow as one near the Lounge Bar Ambrela. I didn't photograph the bar becouse I have it well-documented in some old posts I published a year or two, maybe even three, ago.

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Here you can see another macro shot. This lovely litlle stone was created by the geological weathering process called honeycomb weathering. In this case, seawater did the work. Water carrying dissolved salts seeps into tiny pores and micro-fractures, slowly eroding the limestone and creating bigger holes.

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This photograph shows the same beach from a different angle.

Here you can see a stack of colorful Rotomod sit-on-top kayaks. They will probably stay like this until next summer.

Between the pebbles, five or six meters from the intertidal zone, I saw many small, soft seedlings basking in the sun.

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For this shot, I removed some of the pebbles so you can see more than just small, rounded leaves that are peeking between the stones.

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At this early stage of development, many herbaceous plants look almost the same...

...so I can't tell you exactly what species this is.

It is a photogenic species; that's all I can say.

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Sometimes, from a certain angle, young plants can look cute, almost like puppies.

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It was a cool bunch of green plantlings to photograph.

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So small and already with so much personality.

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Here you can see a friend who was there with me.

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Oh...I almost forgot...the name of the city is Pula!