Life's a beach!

So here's a question for you - what do you do if your kids love the beach, but you live in the middle of even a small country like Scotland? The sea isn't far away, if we compare it to places like Siberia, Switzerland, Kansas, but it's still not exactly on your doorstep. This is what you do - you take them to the local shopping centre, where a wee beach has been set up!

I have to say I find sandy beaches a little odd, I suppose I did see them when I was wee in South Africa, but the sand was too hot to walk on, and the waves were too big to swim in, and there were sharks (to be fair the beaches were netted, but a friend of my dad's (he worked on the docks, so knew people who knew about these things) said that they almost always caught the sharks on the way back out rather than on their way in!), so it was a rather different experience. On Arran the beaches I played on were rocky and stony (apart from occasional picnics to exotic places like Sannox) so my idea of the perfect visit to the seaside involves rocks big enough to climb on and flat stones to skim! Things like this are what I think a walk along the shore is all about! I used to swim there most days in the summer, best bit was riding the wash when the ferry came in.