School finally started and I think the extra hours at work finally caught up to me. Luckily, I got to go camping at the ocean with my brothers. On Wednesday, I went to my brother’s house and spent the night so that I wouldn’t have to drive all the way to Elk Grove in the morning. We got my Dad’s truck all packed up on Wednesday too.

Thursday

We all left Kyle’s house (we being myself, Kyle, Keith, Meghann, Matt G. and Tiffanee) at around 9:30 or so. When we got to the camp ground, the outside temperature was 62 degrees, and the fog still hadn’t lifted. In fact, the fog was there all day, and didn’t lift until that night. One of the unfortunate outcomes of this was that we all forgot about sunscreen. After we got our stuff all set up, we went to the beach with some items from a game set that Keith bought (the game set was made for little kids, so the volley ball net was too low), and used the poles to make two goals, and the inflated rubber volley ball to play soccer. Then after about ten minutes of that we played baseball with the poles as the bases, and used a tennis ball and a metal bat that Tiffanee had in her car. We only stopped playing because we completely destroyed the ball.

For dinner we had hamburgers, hot dogs and sausages. Matt ate three hot dogs, a hamburger and a sausage even though we told him he should have stopped at the three hotdogs. About ten minutes later, he realized that it was a bad plan after saying that his stomach was hurting.

The fog had finally lifted, and after the s’mores, Kyle, Matt and I took our cameras over to the other side of the dunes between our camp site and the beach to take pictures of the stars.

Friday

Friday started early for me. Even though I had a rough night’s sleep (my air mattress never got inflated all the way, and it lost some air during the night), I was still awake by 7 AM. I got tired of just lieing down, so I got up and changed into some pants and a long sleeved shirt (I didn’t want my sun burns to get any worse). I decided to set up some firewood for a morning fire, then started to read. The next person didn’t come out until around 9 or so.

Kyle was the last one to get up, so while we waited for him (he was doing all the cooking), we started the fire and brought out the marshmallows for some more s’mores. Breakfast was great; hash browns, sausage, bacon, eggs, all mixed together in a dutch oven (best thing for cooking when camping). Then some pancakes after that made it complete.

The girls wanted to go to the beach and go into the water. It was finally a sunny day, so they changed and headed off. As the rest of us were gathering things (snacks, chairs, books), an RV decided to pull in to our spot and camp right in front of our cars. We didn’t really mind, seeing as how we were leaving in the morning. After at least five minutes of walking along the beach, we finally found the girls. I made a pathetic attempt at starting a sand castle, whick got Matt inspired to help me make a castle. We definatley made a free form castle, but I think it looks good. After that, Matt and Keith joined Meghann and Tiffanee in the water while Kyle built his own castle. He built a very cookie-cutter sand castle, him being an “engineer” and all.

When we finally retuned from the beach, we saw a lot more cars around the camp grounds. Even in our camp site there were some more people. Another group pulled in around us to take some room over on the other side of us. And just our luck, the new group and the group from the RV new eachother.
Friday’s dinner was probably the best meal of the weekend. We had shish kabobs. stew meat soaked in Tariyaki sauce, with portabello mushroom and green bell peppers (also in the tariyaki), as well as onions. For dessert, we had a cobbler. A camping trip is never complete until you have a cobbler made in a dutch oven, all other desserts (even s’mores) are appetizers compared to this.

Saturday

Final day of our little vacation. We ate some breakfast (same as we had on Friday) then packed everything up and headed out. We took a bit of a detour down Highway 1, but got our bearings soon enough.

I’m glad I was able to take some time off from work. Other than the sunburn, this turned out to be a great trip. Hopefully we’ll be able to do this agian next year.