It Begins

We've been coming the week before Labor Day for the past several years, so it’s odd to be here this early in the summer, and even odder to have it stay light until almost 10 . Another strange thing about this year’s trip is that it is a Monday-Monday adventure.  So after a wonderful day yesterday that started with downtown Nia with Kelle Rae Oien leading the routine “Feeling”, of which she is a co-creator, and ended with the wedding of Breanna and Mitch Davis, I hit the ground running this morning with a well-attended BodyFit class and an hour of working on Dreamwalker. When I got home it was work, work, work until we left for the house at 2:45 – somehow it took more time than it has in other years. Also we forgot many things. Fortunately Josh, Jen, and Tabetha are came out for dinner and are brought many of them. Jen even guessed correctly about which two belts to bring, which sounds much less impressive than it is.

We ran into nasty traffic on the way here; there are two bridges under construction (MP 16 and MP 4) so it took an extra half so. But we remained calm – Tim and Dave in Dave’s car, and I in mine. The big excitement is always to see what has changed, and this year it’s pretty much… nothing. Given that last year we had the gigantic change of going from one bathroom to two, this is kind of nice. When we got here the tide was out, so after unloading and unpacking Dave and I headed down to the beach. This may be the quickest I’ve ever gotten to what I know is my faithful readers’ most awaited blog section: the path and sand report. The path is pretty much unchanged from last year, which means that the bouncy bridge is still bouncy and a little scary. It’s not too overgrown, but then we’re here much earlier in the summer than usual. The sand level is generally high, especially at Hug Point where the dog photographing rocks are completely buried, as is the base of the close in mushroom rock near the waterfall (which is low). The big things is that there are no – 0 – starfish. Maybe one, Dave couldn't tell for sure. This is due to sea star wasting syndrome and it’s not good.

We walked out to the tip of the carriage road, noting the high sands and lack of starfish (note to self – it’s worth carrying shoes to Hug Point). We hung out there for a few minutes while my feet recovered, and then the random sprinkles we had been pretending not to notice got tired of being ignored and got more serious, so we headed back. Tim meanwhile had been enjoying his first nap of the vacation. The house has a unique and pleasant smell, unchanged over the years, and I think that after coming here for so long our whole selves are tuned in to that smell and it causes instant relaxation.

Josh, Jen, and Tabetha got here around 7:30 and Jen and Tabetha immediately headed down to the beach and came right back up. After a short pause for picture taking in which we separated people by what letter their name starts with, we headed over to the Irish Table, where we ate way too much food for two hours. We got to sit at the big round table in the front room under the chandelier which has many small metal elk heads. It was after 10 by the time we got home, so no games tonight, although Dave did try to cut off my head with his quad copter. While I worked on the blog and Dave watched a video about William Shatner and Alton Brown, Tim worked on writing a program that creates randomly sized arrays and then finds their min and max. Whatever it takes to relax.

The things we forgot were all things we would normally have remembered, so I’m not going to list them here.