I'm sat on the sofa, MacBook perched on my lap, going over some photos and generally feeling pretty tired in a really satisfying way.
We've just had a brief weekend run to one of my favourite places on the planet, back in the county I was born in: Whitby.
The plan for the weekend, as it always is when we do a run down there, was to head down, wander around town and do some vague tourist-type things in the afternoon/evening, wake up early in the morning, head to the east beach and go fossil hunting.
Neither of us are fossil-hunting experts, but it's something we like to try and do at least once a year. For me it's a bonus that it's in Whitby as that's a place I just never get bored of. Its connection with all things Gothic and photographic is a constant draw for me.
As for the hunt itself: we managed to find a good few fossils, some being easily uncovered on the beach, some being found as ready-to-pick-up fragments, and some deeply-embedded in nodules that we've brought home to extract at a later date.
Backpacks came off the beach heavier than they went on.
We were pretty lucky with the weather for the trip. While we saw some heavy rain while walking around on Saturday evening (which was enjoyable anyway as the skies were pretty dramatic for it, and we got a pretty neat rainbow as the reward for the wee soaking), Sunday was cool but sunny all the time we were on the hunt. The tide was very much in our favour too (although we'd planned it that way, of course) with low tide being around noon.
We did manage to cut it fine getting back off the beach though. This is a thing you have to watch out for while on the hunt there. While we had plenty of sand/rock to be walking around on where we were hunting, by the time we headed back to the slipway back off the beach the tide was up enough that we had to hop over a crashing wave or two. That part of the beach can be misleading so it's something you do have to watch out for.
So, like I said: I'm happy-knackered on the sofa and satisfied after a fun weekend away. We keep promising ourselves that we will hunt other spots on the North Yorkshire coast, and probably even hunt other parts of the UK, but Whitby is an easy drive and a fun place to just hang out.
We'll be back.