Stinky Beach

We went to our beach this past Saturday, and after a week and a half of rainy weather, we thought it would be crowded. Not so! Maybe the stench had something to do with it, because before we even crossed the Rambla and got down on the sand it hit us. Something fierce. Olía muy, muy feo (It smelled very, very ugly/bad). But we forged on and played for a while in the sand near the street, farthest from the water. Zachariah and I tried not to breathe, and Nuala and Bran didn't seem to care one bit. They're used to stinkiness. We thought the water must be what was smelly but Nuala uncovered the real reason. As she dashed towards the waves, I chased after her and caught up just as she planted a little foot smack in the wavy line of debris that is left when the tide shifts.

BUT, grossness of grossnesses, the shiny, 2-foot wide swath of what we thought was bits of seashells and wood was really all FISH. Up and down the beach, a silvery band of stinky, fishy death. I wish we had brought the camera, because trying to describe the carnage just doesn't do it justice. This was not a few fish here and there, it was like the heavens had opened and emptied sardine cans instead of cloudfuls of manna. Not that they were sardines. Heck, even if they weren't half decayed I probably couldn't tell you what type of fish they were... For the most part they were about 3 or 4 inches long, but there were a few bigger ones, some with wicked-looking teeth. Apparently what happened is since we'd had so much rain, the balance of salt and fresh water in the Río de la Plata was thrown out of whack, killing the poor innocents. Refreshingly, once we crossed the band of death, we couldn't smell a thing, and the water was really rather lovely. The problem was keeping the twins from wanting to run back and forth on the shiny dead fish -- ugh.

AND (seriously, this would only happen to me. Or, rather, only one as obsessed as I am would notice), washed up on the beach was a 3-inch dead cockroach! Come ON! A cockroach at the beach? Seriously? Who would expect that? Can I not escape them? Don't I get enough of them at home? And I do. Okay, whining over (for now).

I did get a nice sunburn on my back, but by that afternoon it had turned to a tan already. I love how that works... Zachariah gets slightly bitter sometimes, haha! That redhead skin of his might be a pain sometimes, but his hair is gorgeous :) How did he survive a year in Hawaii, at the beach almost everyday? And then a mission on the steamy island of Okinawa? Questions to ponder, indeed...


This map (from worldatlas.com) shows how we're right there on the edge of the river and the ocean. I think technically Playa Carrasco (our beach) is still the river, but you can see how it's a mixture of the fresh and salt water.