South Beach Fun

We spent the weekend before last in South Beach, which is just past Newport. We had planned to come with our friends, Mark and Lisa and Ava -- we'd talked about camping with them for years, ever since we met them after Ava and Colin both ended up in Mrs. Abel's kindergarten class and all of us clicked nicely but things never really got going until after Lisa simply took charge and made reservations for us.

The weather, going in, looked frightful, and our friends decided to skip Saturday and show up on Sunday. Hating to miss out on even a single day's worth of vacation, we went down as originally planned.

There was some rain on Saturday evening and we were further inconvenienced by the fact that we managed to leave one of our two well-packed camping bins at home, which meant that we had no pots and pans or dishpan or dish soap. We did, however, have some metal skewers and a packet of hot dogs, so we made do with that quite nicely.

The beach was conveniently close. The next morning, Tad officially lost his title as "Safety Parent." This is the title given to the one parent who is quite a bit more safety conscious than the other one -- there has to be one in every relationship, otherwise the children would never survive to adolescence. In our case, I lost any chance at that designation when I was left alone with the boys one afternoon. When Tad came home, he came into the bedroom where I was relaxing and demanded: "You gave the boys KNITTING NEEDLES to play with????" In retrospect, giving a pair of active little boys two pointy steel rods with which to practice their swordsmanship may not have been the best choice of playthings.

In any case, on this day, I managed to drop one of our walky talkies into the soft, dry part of the jetty. It landed on soft sand and I could clearly see it about six feet beneath me. The hole was wide enough so that I could probably have shimmied down after it, but I would have been quite cagey about doing so.

I waited for Tad to show up and when he did, I outlined the situation to him. I fully expected him, as S.P., to simply write off the $40 G.I. Joe's walkie talkies, but instead, he said: "Well, I think Ethan would fit down there, don't you think?"

Now, the truth was, the same thought had crossed my mind, but I was slightly horrified, less at the danger to my second-born son, than the realization that we had, with one blow, lost the designated S.P. in our family unit.

The boys are doomed.

In any case, I pinch hit and convinced Tad that even though he felt like he was "pretty sure" that he could fish Ethan back out without any difficulty, the fact that he had to qualify his response might perhaps indicate that there was a small chance of not retrieving our child again without a lot of trouble. So that was abandoned, though Tad lobbied for it at length and probably only gave it up when Ethan showed a less than enthusiastic response at the scheme.

Eventually, Tad fished the thing out with a long stick and some string he found on the beach, so all ended without any significant tragedy.

On Sunday, our friends arrived and we spent a perfectly lovely day on the beach, marvelling that we actually felt a little hot (!) on an Oregon beach. It was wonderful, especially as they made us a lovely dinner that night. The boys had a lot of fun building dams and hunting for sea critters with Ava (Colin is shown at the top with a crab he caught in the jetty).

We did a few hours at the Oregon Aquarium on Monday afternoon and then vamoosed back home.