Independence Day

We thought we would go through the photos we took from our 4th of July at Long Beach, WA. Great weather, great company, some decent food, but a WAR ZONE on the beach. Look at these photos and see for yourself.

Amanda and Robert ended up taking the twins off the beach pretty early because of all the smoke. Who would have thought she was an OK parent, way to go sis! We also ended up leaving Bailey in the hotel room for the night. I guess she doesn't like explosions in every direction. Maybe that means Shawna and I are going to be good parents? The whole fireworks on the beach experience was pretty neat, but it is hard to get past the constant wall of smoke, the irresponsible parents, and the constant worry that some sort debris is going to fall on you at any moment. At one point I saw a dad teaching his young boy to hold a Roman Candle high in the air while it shot off. I would like to take a moment to thank my parents for not allowing me to blow my hand off in such a manner. We did enjoy watching the constant fireworks and did some good Smore roasting. I attempted to show Shawna how to melt the chocolate by balancing it on the metal prongs over the fire, but failed when it fell in the sand. Eventually we buried our fire and joined the mass of people exiting the beach. When we got back to the hotel room we realized that our clothing now smelled like we had worn them all week camping.

Of course there was plenty of adventure too! Early that day there was a parade through the streets of Ocean Park. We were hoping to take the twins to see it, but that didn't quite happen, so we decided to drive out to meet up with Koby and Andrea at the end of the peninsula and get the day moving, when the traffic got unbearable. We were driving along the main strip and saw a large area of congestion, with crowds of people and the road blocked off, so we did the smart thing and turned down a side street to go around it. Well, apparently our new-fangled GPS thing-a-ma-bobber isn't so new-fangled, and doesn't know when we should avoid specific side roads. We turned a corner and thought we would be able to get back to light speed when some guy stopped us to let a few (I think it was 947,839) cars go in front of us. Apparently we were on a road for cars that should hurry up and wait. Eventually we were allowed to squeeze in between a couple vehicles and move another 50 feet before, you guessed it, stopping.

Now here's the fun part. The flagger wasn't doing a very good job since our vehicle wasn't all dressed up with balloons, streamers, signs, etc. I say this because almost all the other cars were! I kid you not, we ended up in the Ocean Park parade, or at least the tail end of it. There were floats, trailers with booster clubs, convertibles with unimportant people waving. It was very "small town," but fun. I wish we had taken a few pictures so you could all share in the enjoyment of the moment, but Shawna was getting tired of my driving by then, so we were more focused on getting ourselves moving again.

Needless to say, we were tired of our hour long car wait, so we started pulling u-turns, covert maneuvers through side streets, and I think we may have gone on two wheels at one point, finally getting back on track. We met up with Andrea, Koby, Tyler, and his wife Linda, and off we went in search of treasure! Our treasure hunting (also known as a hike for excersise) took us up a good hill to Fort Canby at Cape Disappointment. It was a good weathered, pretty day and a hike was really what we needed. As you can see, some of the views are great from the top!

On the way back we stopped at a little cove that's usually quiet and not often used by people. Needless to say, there were people on it, but that didn't stop us from climbing treacherous cliffs, scaling old weathered, jagged rocks that were as slippery as an ice rink, and braving the potentially shark infested waters so that we could see some wildlife in their natural habitat. All we really ended up seeing were a couple crabs hanging out in the sun. We found two or three dead crabs that hadn't been picked apart by the birds yet. We also saw some tiny little fishies in a tide pool! I'm not an expert or anything, but I think they might have been killer whales just hatched from their eggs!

I really feel like we gained a lot of muscle from our treasure hunting hike!

All in all, it was a good weekend. We chose to drive down to Seaside, OR on our way home Sunday and found out that the weather had held just long enough for us to have a good Independence Day.

-Larry and Shawna