Burning yet another vacation day I wouldn’t have been using for anything better anyway, I decided to join in on Wendi’s cunning plan to get the hell out of town for most of a day. We ended up bringing along her usual babysitting charge, Nzhone, but that wasn’t a bad thing.

We packed up, hit the gas station, hit the store, then took off down the Sunset Highway for Cannon Beach. Just before we arrived we decided to stop off for another visit to the World’s Largest Sitka Spruce, or whatever.

Okay, I like trees. But seriously, who travelled the globe, hiked through every forest, just to discover the largest available tree in a particular species? Wow. And I thought I was geeky.

Anyway, we arrived at the beach, trekked out to the sand and surf and proceeded to enjoy the heck out of it all. The kids dug in the sand, we all got our feet wet, we snacked on occasion. At one point Wendi found a… small creature.

No, I don’t know exactly what it was. I’m open to enlightenment, folks.

After our lunch break (no, we didn’t eat that small creature) Haystack Rock became our destination. The kids had a blast climbing around in the tidepools. Alex even scrambled out on his own initiative to look at the sign on the rock. Good heavens, he really is a real boy. (At his age, I’d never have done anything like that. Astonishing.) The girls, of course, busied themselves with the age-old task of getting just as wet and muddy as humanly possible, and enlisting other small children as accomplices. I just took lots of pictures and made a fool of myself for posterity, among other useless acts of nonsense.

Eventually we were all tuckered out, so we piled into the van and headed for home. Other than a traffic jam on the inbound Sunset that forced us to take a scenic route home, we encountered no problems. Except for the small matter of sunburn, that is. You see, while Wendi was making sure that everyone else was appropriately slathered with sunscreen, she forgot about preserving her own skin. (I had assumed she’d already done that, so I didn’t ask. Bad on me.) She’s going to be very, very uncomfortable over the next couple of (working) days. Ouch.

And so here we are, back at home after a grand day at the beach. Oh, you wanted more pictures? Check just below.
Coast Trip – July 2003