This was a special moment for me this summer. We took a few extra days off before Blue Skies so that we could have a bit of a vacation before the festival. One activity that I wanted to do was to take the kids swimming at Palmerston Lake, where I used to swim when I was a kid.

It was threatening to rain, but we went to the beach anyway and luckily it stayed clear all morning. Finna fell asleep in the van on the way there, so Angela stayed with her in the parking lot until she woke up. Kai was a little apprehensive about the cold water, so he mostly played in the sand.

Aila loves the water and didn't seem to mind the cold, so we had a lot of fun running in and goofing around in the water. We found the "Australia" rock, and we swam out to the big rocks off shore and climbed around on them.

Because of the weather, we were the only people at the beach, so we had a very peaceful time. At one point, Aila just started wading out as far as she could. It was a really neat scene to see her up to her chest in the calm water with nobody else in sight. I tried to capture the scene in this image.

The beach on Palmerston Lake is really a beautiful spot, and it hasn't changed at all since I was a kid. I'm really glad I was able to share it with my kids, if only for a couple of hours. Hopefully we can go back again in years to come.

Technical Details: This is a still from a video taken with my Canon 5D Mark II + EF 17-40L at 40mm, Auto ISO, f/8 for 1/30th of a second.